> 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.