You're thinking like an outsider instead of an insider.

My friend's kids are going there ahead of mine. I know plenty of people there, including folks involved in admissions. I'm contacted to write letters for candidates. etc. You stay plugged into the system.

I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

In any case, plenty of labs, mine included have several highschool students at any one time. But guess how you get in? With connections.

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jjmarr 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

> I have no idea what mechanism a faculty member would use to charge a highschool student. But I think that's rather unethical and useless. Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

The faculty member is keeping the money for themselves. Some might call it a bribe.

It's unethical (and possibly worse) but it is happening. The students themselves aren't doing actual research, they're given busywork because it's understood to be resume padding.

> But guess how you get in? With connections.

Over time, "connections" degrade into kickbacks and corruption. My point is that these lab positions are going to be meaningless in a decade due to bribery.

It will be similar to how every student at top high schools is an executive in a club because those schools have fake clubs that don't meet or do anything.

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SJC_Hacker 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> Finances of labs are such that this money is worthless.

Depends on how much money we’re talking about

Things start getting “interesting” maybe around $50k. And yes there are people who will pay that much

University professors are also grossly underpaid relative to the difficulty of the job

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light_hue_1 5 days ago | parent [-]

In my experience the kinds of kids who are worth having in the lab are not from the kinds of families that can afford 50k.

In any case, I would never charge a summer student. And I have no idea how my university would do that if I tried. There's no mechanism. And even if there was, that money would go to the university not my lab. So it's useless.

I very much doubt this is going on. It's definitely not happening at top 10 places.

	▲	SJC_Hacker 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		> In any case, I would never charge a summer student. And I have no idea how my university would do that if I tried. There's no mechanism. And even if there was, that money would go to the university not my lab. So it's useless. The university wouldn't know what was going on, and there wouldn't be anything technically illegal. Speaking fees are one obvious way to do this. Most of the time, college professors don't want anything to do with high school students, or even undergrads most of the time. They only do it because they are told to or there is some personal benefit to them.
	▲	BrenBarn 5 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> In my experience the kinds of kids who are worth having in the lab are not from the kinds of families that can afford 50k. This is a fundamental issue in my view. The types of people who will do good work are precisely the type who have not been trained by privilege to believe that they can get by without doing good work. But it is those with the privilege who are most able to get themselves into positions where good work would be beneficial. Hence the incentives are exactly backwards and we need to make a deliberate effort to exclude exactly the types of people who most "naturally" will crowd into certain jobs and positions, and include those who are least likely to naturally do so.