> 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

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.