Should professors pay undergraduate students doing research in their labs?
I have some undergraduate students doing research in my lab, and I pay them by the hours. I've observed that the students usually do what I tell them and don't go beyond that (as we usually expect from research) even though I encourage them to do so. They also work exactly the assigned hours (says 10 hours/week). You know, like the regular employees in a company, not like a researcher in academia.
I discussed this with other faculty members in my department, and some of them told me that I have been doing it wrong. That I should not pay the students (except during the summer) as this job is for them to have research experience and learn research skills. Only the students who are really interested in doing and learning research will volunteer to work in the lab for free, and these are the students we want in the lab, not the students who (mainly / only) work for the compensation. And my colleagues told me that they had very few undergraduate students working in their labs for free, but those have been very good students who would co-author papers and continue to graduate schools (Master or PhD).
On the other hand, I've heard from some good undergraduate students (in terms of GPA and technical skills) that they would never work an unpaid position.
I've been thinking about this lately. Am I doing it wrong? I'm not cheap, but if paying the students to do research results in wrong motivation and expectation for them, and if not paying them is a good filtering mechanism to select good students, maybe I should do that.
What do you think? Do you have any good strategy to have good undergraduate students doing research in your lab?
Btw, I'm in the US.
Updates: I was not clear in my original post, so here are some clarifications.
- My expectation: the research tasks for my students require them to get familiar with a programming language and learn to use some special software before they can do the research. These skills are not taught in the formal course of study, so I can't find any undergraduate students who posses these skills. These are very valuable skills in my field, especially in industry. If I were them, I would spend my personal time to learn these skills as fast as I can, and, in parallel, spend most of my paid time in the lab to use these skills to do the actual research tasks. I would do that because I am excited about doing good research work. That's my expectation. My current students have spent almost all their paid time in the lab to learn, rather than to do. And they only learn during the exact assigned work hours. Two months in, and they are still mostly in the learning / training mode.
- One might say that companies pay new employees to learn / train / retrain before they can actually do useful work. But a professor / university lab is not a company. Compared to a company, even a small startup, I have very limited funding and resources (not to mention the retaining rate of undergraduate students after training is much lower than at a company). I must figure out the best way to spend my fund.
- Purely from the productivity point of view, paying undergraduate students to do my research seems to be the worst way to spend my research funds and my time. A skilled PhD student or part-time contractor can finish the tasks much much faster and likely at higher quality than my group of undergraduate students can finish in 3+ months. I know that because during my postdoc, I mentored a number of good PhD students. The total cost would be similar in the end. Given that, why did I hire them and agree to mentor them? Because I liked that they seemed to be interested in research, and I wanted to give them opportunities to gain such skills and experience.
- However, if their cost is eating too much into my limited funding with a minimal return, I should have a second thought about it because in the end, no one but I must take care of my own business (my research, and eventually my tenure). Getting research funding has become increasingly difficult.
- Do I care about disadvantaged students and want to give them opportunities? My colleagues and I are going to organize STEM camps for many underrepresented students in the area, free of charge (of course with external funding). But I think this should be separate from my research career, for now.
3 Answers
Generally, yes undergraduates should be paid for their research. This is an equity issue. At many institutions, a large portion of the student body has to work while they study in order to survive. If student research is unpaid, those students will not be able to participate. Students who have to work are often also members of other underrepresented groups such as racial minorities.
It is also a justice issue. If students are doing valuable work, it is only fair to pay them. It is also unjust to expect students to work more than the assigned hours.
I should add that it is not appropriate to pay students for work that earns course credit.
If your research students are not achieving what you want them to do, you need to be sure you are setting clear expectations. You also need to be willing to part with under-achieving students.
I was an undergraduate who was paid for his work (rather than receiving credit; I had the option of one or the other, but research credits in the department I worked in were useless to me). I worked at that lab throughout undergrad and am now a staff scientist in the same group.
You really should give your students one or the other, or both, if your university allows it. It seems to me fairly unethical to have someone do work for you without compensating them. Of course, there are realities of budgets, but you really should strive to pay people for work they do.
(Honestly, it's ridiculous that you have to pay to take research credits, but that's a different post.)
They also work exactly the assigned hours (says 10 hours/week). You know, like the regular employees in a company, not like a researcher in academia.
Well, yeah. Before I was hired, we set an expectation that I would work 10 hours a week in my mentor's lab. (In fact there may be a limit on students' working hours, my university's was 19.) I don't understand why you think anyone would work hours for free when they are paid hourly. If you need more than 10 hours/week out of them, then hire them for more hours.
Even if you had volunteers; you should set some sort of expectation with them for how many hours (on average) they should put in. Yes, some weeks will be more, some weeks less, but a volunteer should know how much work you want out of them.
Only the students who are really interested in doing and learning research will volunteer to work in the lab for free
This is not true; let me be a counterpoint. Only the students who can afford to will volunteer to work in your lab for free. That is, students who have support from their parents, or who don't already work a job for money will work for you for free. I am sure that the best undergraduate research assistants do not come solely from the pool of people with wealthier parents.
Am I doing it wrong? I'm not cheap, but if paying the students to do research results in wrong motivation and expectation for them, and if not paying them is a good filtering mechanism to select good students, maybe I should do that.
No, not paying them is not "a good filtering mechanism to select good students." You sound like a new professor, and I think your own "filtering mechanisms" will improve as you interview and hire more undergrads over the years. At my lab, we went through about three for a position over three quarters before settling on a good, motivated undergraduate.
Edit:
After thinking about this for a few days, I would also point out that some types of relationships don't need to be paid. For example, students at my university can do honors projects in their department. Supervising these students is more of a service from professors than an employer/employee relationship, and undergrads seek out professors to supervise them, rather than professors recruiting students.
I assumed from your description of your students having been hired for 10 hours/week that this isn't the relationship you have with them. To put it another way, if you are getting value out of them that either you or a graduate student would have had to perform (e.g. feeding rats, interviewing human subjects) you should pay them. If you put out an ad looking for undergraduates, you should pay them.
In terms of equity, you should always be trying to pay your undergraduates, but I don't want to deny the existence of some relationships where not paying them may not be unethical.
It's unfair to take valuable labor from anyone, including students, without compensation. On the other hand, new undergraduates just starting in a research lab are often 90% training and 10% productivity (*). For new graduate students, it might be 75%/25%. So the training alone might be pay enough when a student is first starting out.
(*) 1 undergraduate summer = 1 graduate student month = 1.5 postdoc weeks = 1 professor week. That may sound harsh, but it's my own experience after 30 years spread across all four of those categories. It also varies by student.
A typical progression might look like this:
Join the group for a month without pay or credit, and demonstrate that you can contribute and collaborate. Solve a simple technical problem or two.
Get paid relatively low wages for a quarter/semester/summer to be a simple assistant to others in the group: an apprentice. Just do what needs to be done that day. Become an expert? Higher pay.
Get research credit for a project that's actually yours. You're expected to produce publishable results, if not a full paper. Increased future career earnings are worth the cost of tuition.
Get a summer or other research fellowship that combines the best of 2 (pay) and 3 (interesting project).
Those who want more pay or more freedom will work hard to earn it. Those who don't aren't rehired next term. I had one mentor tell me to "fire" one student each year. Looking back, I wish I had accepted that advice much earlier in my career. Be explicit from Day 1 what you expect so they're not surprised and you're not disappointed.
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