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I'm not going to retweet The Bad Take, but a core purpose of a lab should be to educate students and expose them to the research process. If you aren't paying them a living wage so that they can afford to focus on learning the research process, you're failing in that goal. 1/
Could you pay someone with more skills to do research more efficiently? Sure! But then you'd be abandoning part of the purpose of your research program. 2/
And as a side note, training undergrads does nothing of they can't afford to
-apply to grad school
-move to a new city and pay first + last + security
-feed themselves for the first month while they wait for their stipend to kick in
3/
-apply to grad school
-move to a new city and pay first + last + security
-feed themselves for the first month while they wait for their stipend to kick in
3/
Imagine if we paid undergrads enough that they could actually SAVE for this stuff (or, imagine if grad programs actually covered relocation costs but that's a different conversation)
You'll always find students who can do this (focus on research, transition to grad school) without making a living wage, but by not paying one you're closing the door in the face of anyone who can't. 4/
And by the way, this discourse is totally interlaced with last week's "do you need a paper to get into grad school" discourse. 5/
In a system where we don't pay undergrads appropriately, students who can afford to work 20 hours in a week for no or very little money are the ones publishing papers, the ones getting into prestigious programs, the ones getting NSF fellowships. 6/
Not paying undergrads a living wage is just another way we stack the academic system against folks without $$. 7/
We are all walking around wringing our hands talking about DEI, and then erecting enormous barriers to changing our system 8/
Like, maybe paying our undergrads more does mean we do slightly less efficient research; but maybe we should accept that doing the most efficient research is not the only goal of a research group. 9/
Even if paying UGs more means less opportunities for UGs overall, I don't think giving a smaller but more diverse group of UGs a more meaningful research experience is necessarily a bad outcome 10/
In conclusion pay your undergrads (and everyone else in your group) a living wage! Thanks for coming to my TED talk. (End)
