# Should I attend a worse college for better GPA in an EA perspective?

> Source: <https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/SmjzEoCad8n7xiWAr/should-i-attend-a-worse-college-for-better-gpa-in-an-ea>
> Published: 2026-06-16 12:37:18+00:00

Hello everyone,

My career goal is to reduce AI risks. If I major in CS, I could attend a top-tier college in Taiwan. In the future, I may pursue a master or PhD degree in US.

However, according to some EAs, chasing a high GPA is mostly for signaling rather than improving my research abilities, because some college courses are irrelevant to AI risks.(I'm uncretain about this view)

In Taiwan,** a person who gets a 3.8 GPA at a mid-tier college might only get a 3.2 GPA at a top-tier college due to grade deflation.**

**When applying to master’s programs and internships in the U.S., GPA seems to matter much more than the college name in Taiwan**, especially because U.S. evaluators may not know how large the difference in student ability is between top-tier and mid-tier Taiwanese schools.

So the choice may look like this:

It seems obvious that option 1 gives the weakest academic credential in the US. So** the choice may be between options 2 and 3**: whether it is worth investing around 1,000 extra hours to improve the “school name” on my resume.

**What do you think is the best choice for an EA? If uncertain, what are your main cruxes?**

Of course, there are still other advantages to choosing a top-tier school, such as better peers and research environment. However, these advantages seem to come at the high cost of spending more time maintaining GPA.

Please don’t aim for a rigorous answer. A one-minute gut intuition would already be very helpful. Thanks a lot for answering