Thanks for the thoughts!

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

I've visited UnCollege once. The participants there seemed very curious and open to experience. I don't know enough about the program itself to make an assessment, though my superficial impressions were favorable. I tend to think that going to college is a good idea for almost everyone who's capable of doing well there, and to that extent there's tension between my views and theirs, but in many cases the participants seemed to be delaying college by a single year rather than not attending altogether.

I don't know what their funding model is – do you? I assumed that the participants pay.

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

Yeah, I've been hesitant to post to College Confidential because of their strict no-advertising policy. I made a few of our posts to Reddit, but didn't get any upvotes.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

We've done some of this (e.g. Gifted Homeschoolers Forum links an article that I wrote about college admissions for home schoolers, but we can probably do more. Thanks.

It's also important to note that K-12 education tends to infantilize people in general (and restrain their imagination of what's possible and what isn't). Many (though not all) 16-18 year old homeschooled students can have incredible levels of maturity and self-awareness.

I'm curious: what sorts of communities are they most familiar with? What did they think of College Confidential? And what were the subreddits that they were most familiar with?

We've struggled to find avenues by which to disseminate our advice. There seem to be few forums where smart high school students congregate. Those forums and mailing lists that do exist often have strict guidelines against posters promoting their own blogs. We're grateful that Less Wrong has been welcoming.

I think you are likely making a strategic mistake by focusing on outreach instead of focusing on building a place where people want to go.

A wordpress page that doesn't have an RSS feed but points me to a list of blog post written on another forum and a link to a Quora blog doesn't give the impression of a highly reputable venue.

You wrote a bunch of high value post but didn't published them on your own website but on Lesswrong and Quora. That's nice for Lesswrong but doesn't provide you yourself with a website that get's good traffic from google.

Given that you already have a strategy of writing high value posts have you thought about asking a place like Business Insider or Forbes whether they would pay you to write posts on a blog on their platform?

At this point, we're seeking philanthropic funding, and would appreciate any ideas as to how to secure it.

In the effective altruistic community there are people thinking about spending money where it has the highest impact, what's your exact case, that they should give you that money instead of giving it to malaria prevention?

When it comes to having a public reputation I would also recommend to give speeches. There might be plenty of venues in San Francisco that like quality speeches on education. It might be a better way to build relationships with people who are willing to give you money than seeking money online, where you don't meet the people who make the decisions face to face.

I'm curious - what do you think of UnCollege and how it manages to advertise/fund itself? Would you be interested in following a similar model?

Also - what about advertising on sites like College Confidential and reddit? It probably wouldn't run well with the mods there if you advertised too much, but doing it once might work.

I think getting in touch with the homeschooling community might also provide some ideas. People in those communities can be incredibly motivated and resourceful.

I almost never found it cliquish, which is different from what I've heard of other elite schools. People are either notably shy or willing to talk to anyone, anytime, about their favorite intellectual topics. (I guess what I'm saying is that the UChicago autism bell curve is a few standard deviations to the right of the usual one...)

Another UChicago alum. FWIW, my experience as an undergrad was that there wasn't all that much social mixing between the undergrads and the graduate students. I'm sure it occurred some, but the difference in life stage between those two populations was sufficiently large that mixing did not occur naturally. My impression was the grad students were aloof from the undergrads, not that the undergrads were hostile to grad students (undergrad hostility would surprise me, since many undergrads at UChicago thought they would be graduate students some time in the future).

Most student groups I participated in were overwhelmingly undergrad, such that a graduate student would stand out. But I mostly participated in academic competition groups (Mock Trial, Parliamentary Debate) that wouldn't have allowed graduate students to participate in the actual competitions.

That would be a bit unusual in the dormitory dining halls (and it should also be noted that their food is terrible), but pretty feasible at Bartlett Commons or the Reynolds Club. Or you could crash conversations at one of the campus coffee shops.

I don't want to make it sound like all U of C students have conversations like this, but I could almost always find one happening. (It helped that I made friends with other people who liked abstract arguments.)

UChicago alum speaking. I loved the school, for reasons very similar to why I love Less Wrong. More students there are philosophically inclined, idiosyncratic, and generally willing to entertain strange arguments than at any other school I know of. LW meetups at their best remind me of the dining hall conversations at the U of C.

The proportion of atheists may be also high at some of the Ivy League schools, but that atheism generally has a relativist flavor rather than a rationalist one, and people there are less willing to deal with ideas contrary to that worldview. The traditional UChicago student will actually give an absurd but well-argued idea a genuine hearing!

Major caveat, though: graduate departments are always very different from the undergraduate college.