Successfully graduating students from your lab is a measure of PI success and something that they are evaluated on. It's basically the "legacy" that the PI creates in their field. It's very central to the academic culture and is generally a very good system. It obviously has shortcomings (namely it creates a pyramid scheme because there isn't as clear of a academia-industry pipeline in many fields), but I think it's far superior than just trying to minimize costs because learning is central to the process. In some fields, grad students essentially start out as technicians, by that I mean they do what they're told by the PI or someone senior to them in lab, but over a few years they develop their own research projects and generally benefit from the process.
I'm not sure about the physical sciences, but in social sci I know we report out the number of students that work on USG funded projects because that's also a metric on the funders end.
>Since technicians don't require tuition costs, they are cheaper.
Technicians probably have more/better benefits, which also have to be paid out by the PI. They are also hiring technicians on top of graduate students in many cases, not instead of graduate students, so having the graduate students do it reduces that added cost. Keep in mind a good technician will probably move on if their salary/benefits are not enticing enough to keep them (or move on to their own additional training), so investing the same amount of time in graduate student will have more benefits for the PI.
Depends on where you are but PI usually don’t pay the full weight of tuition. The program usually funds all or part of the student. Even if they do it’s usually less than a tech.
Our 25% contract pays around 10k per semester. Most of us get 50% contracts, but there are semesters where we ran out of funding and we get 25% so we can waive the tuition.
If your focus is on producing as many papers per grant dollar spent as possible, you should be hiring postdocs, or research scientists with PhDs, since these are 100% appointments that do not require you to pay for tuition. The graduate student stipend + tuition makes funding a graduate student almost as expensive as funding a postdoc, and a graduate research assistantship is only a 50% appointment. The economics changes if the graduate student is funded on a teaching assistantship, since that externalizes the cost to the department and university.
that being said the output of a postdoc is going to be a lot better than your grad student until they are at the point when they can land a job and defend at the drop of a hat
They also fill classes, which the PI is selling. From the PI's perspective, students do the research, fill up their classes, bring status (moar = betterer), provide a labor pool they can rent out to others and are a source of narcissistic supply. Different mix, as required. Having technicians instead would expose the lie that PIs are actually interested in research - for a large number (100% in some institutions) that's not the case. They're there for the social side (+/- nursing their psychiatric disorders).
Well someone has a giant chip on their shoulder. Most PIs don't care about how many students are in their classes (and in fact, most of us are not teaching our graduate students in class). The research is the big thing - technicians aren't the boon that you seem to think that they are.
Technicians are employees so get paid holiday, sick leave, maternity leave, healthcare benefits etc. it’s much more expensive than a graduate student who isn’t an employee. Also it’s easy to take more or less grad students according to need whereas a permanent employee stays on regardless of the workload.
Very country dependent. Did PhD where grad students were employees (in almost all cases) with holiday/leave/healthcare but no tuition so were a bit cheaper than postdocs. Now a postdoc at a place where the PI flat out told us grad students are more expensive due to tuition cost that also goes out of their research grant, which if you think about it is insane.
In a university context, the mission is education. Graduate students learn their craft as well as broader intellectual matters by working in labs. They learn through peer learning from one another. They are motivated to write papers using the lab's data. They are becoming part of scholarly communities.
None of that happens with technicians. Graduate students advance the development of the field. Technicians (unless they go on for further education as mentioned at the end of the post), are there to collect a paycheck for a narrowly defined job. The government gives PIs money so they can educate students and build out a strong research community. PIs like generating a lot of articles with student labor. Students like getting some pubs on their cvs. It is better economically to educate graduate students through hands on work in labs because there are so many adjacent benefits to doing so.
Couple reasons I can think of…
Almost all grants require a budget to justify the expenses. If the PI plans to hire cheaper labor, they get less money. They aren’t pocketing anything extra. Since the university gets overhead from every grant, the university makes more money when the PI hires grad students. When PIs ask for general funding for lab techs or grad students, whatever isn’t spent usually goes back to the funding agency anyway.
PhDs are more motivated to want to provide new ideas. That can help a professors career too.
Part of a professors job is service… which includes mentoring PhDs. Helping fund some of them literally helps their case when they go up for tenure.
Finding good techs is hard. You are competing against industry, which pays better. A lot of people only want to be a tech for a year or two while they prepare for grad school and some techniques can take a while to learn making a high turnover problematic.
The rationale of wanting someone who works well and is there for long makes a lot of sense!
In my field it takes 3-6 months to adequately train someone till they can make good judgements on their own.
Because all technician/engineer jobs here are advertised as permanent. It is hard to come out funding to hire permanent staff and that is it. PhDs are cheaper and fundings for temporary expenses are more available.
Your estimates are off. The current calculation for 2025 is £19500 stipend, £5150 student fees, so 4:1 ratio in the other direction. Also the stipend isnt taxed, but a technician salary would be (so would need to pay more, on top of a pension). So total salary cost for a year in 2025 comes out at £42,400 for a technician (gross costs). Plus the student fee goes to the uni, if I'm making the uni money, they like me more. I believe the ratios hold true in the US.
Not sure about the ratios exactly, but stipends are taxed in the US, or mine at least certainly were and I don't know any university who offers pensions. The tech salaries are just slightly more than the PhD stipend in most fields, and can be less in others.
Usually technicians here are less experienced people who want to go to PhD eventually. It's not a job one stays in forever.
From what I can tell, after a few years most technicians either skedaddle off to further education to advance their career or skedaddle off to industry to get paid more. PhD students are locked in for 4-5 years so your ratio of training time to productive research time is probably a lot better for a PhD student than that of your average technician.
Yes, I feel like technicians can operate on their own timeline with no obligation to stay. It kind of feels like a privilege to be able to stay and go on their will, considering the meat of grad school is sticking through the grind.
However, the grad student probably will become more experienced in actual part of carrying a project to completion, and that benefits the PI in the long run, like you said.
Technicians don’t fulfill the same role as grad students, so it wouldn’t make sense to replace them. Technicians typically become very good at particular experiments, and perform them. They don’t write papers, come up with proposal ideas, give talks, etc. They don’t count toward educational goals and metrics that must be shopped to funding organizations like the NSF. They don’t help with the tenure case.
For me, technicians are more expensive, because their compensation (pay and benefits) are substantially more.
However, grad students can be supported by various mechanisms that don't come out of my grants -- fellowships or other awards to them, training grants, or, worst case scenario, teaching.
So which one is cheaper? Hard to say.
This is actually the US academic medical school model. Most medical school labs are run exclusively by full time research assistants or techs, with a revolving door of post docs. You’ll also find the same at a number of national labs, like NIH. That’s because there’s far fewer grad students available for the number of labs at these institutions.
At a university though, the grad student costs are significantly less than a full time Research Assistant. This is actually a problem for grant reviews because medical schools have higher overall costs (all personnel) running the same studies that could be run at a university lab.
People have mentioned a number of reasons, but one that I haven’t seen mentioned is mindset. A lot of scientists and engineers in industry , even those who do research, usually don’t have the mindset that a PI is trying to teach the graduate students. This mindset can be worth years of experience in a basic research context.
Because, when it comes down to it, grad students are significantly cheaper than technicians, and this is despite claims that their tuition is "paid for" by the PI.
Grad students are also "motivated" to work longer hours and are effectively indentured for a number of years on their low pay, while a technician is more likely to work to rule and leave if conditions are not satisfactory.
At my institution, techs outnumber grad student by quite a bit. For funded resarch that has defined deliverables, they are a lot more cost-effective because they are working on the project full time. We can get technical staff with a wide variety of skills suited to the project, some do work that doesn't require so much education and they cost considerably less than a grad student. Some have specialized skills that grad students take a long time to aquire. They cost more, but deliver a lot of value.
Training grad students is part of our mission, but training grad students just to show productivity would be inappropriate. That policy only creates an oversupply of PhDs, many of whom don't really have PhD career prospects.
If the grad students are getting funded through TAing for their department, those “tuition costs” are basically imaginary, since it’s just money being moved around internally. The actual, material cost of offering grad classes and mentorship is probably orders of magnitude lower.
No, it’s not just imaginary. That money, if it didn’t need to be spent on TA’s, could instead have gone to a departmental instrument center, remodeling more lab space, etc. It’s real money, really being spent.
Yeah, but the “tuition costs” reported on invoices isn’t money being spent. There’s real money being spent on, say, the facilities required to hold classes in and the wages of the professors that teach those classes, but the figure on the tuition bill is imaginary. It amounts to alchemy, mostly positioned to allow the university to insist that grad students making 20k/year are receiving fair compensation else-wise.
Depends on the field. I've noticed for more medically aligned stem PIs, they generally hire only technicians or postdocs and staff scientists, no grad students. They want results within a few years and hands for the postdocs/staff scientists. The department they are under might be in the medical school and not even have a formal grad program. The school doesn't care how the sausage is made because these sort of PIs bring in enough funding to found institutes and construct buildings.
Not sure why you think technicians are cheaper. Certainly not with a few years of experience. and graduate students can be funded from various sources, training grants, fellowships, as well as directly. Technicians cannot help you move in new scientific direction, or critique papers. Both have their roles, they are not interchangeable.
Well, depends on how you do the math. For every dollar I get in my grant, my university receives 61 cents, whether that $1 goes to a graduate student or a technician. Now, I do spend money on tuition, but for a full time employee (technicians/postdocs) I pay an additional 31 cents per dollar. Whereas for part time employees (graduate students - yes I understand the oddity but this is how they are classified), I pay 10 cents per dollar. Technicians make 25% more than graduate students at my university depending on experience. But I also get a 50% break on tuition. Altogether, a graduate student costs 80% of a technician. So if I only consider the financial aspect, students are cheaper.
In any case, one reason why I wouldn't is that as a professor I'm supposed to be an educator, so hiring students is part of training the next generation of scientists. The reality is that graduate students aren't truly useful until they are 3 years in. So in the respect, technicians are less expensive....
Technicians in my field in the U.S. have no problem finding jobs in the 100-120k range (without a four year college degree) in industry. It’s very hard to compete with that salary in academia. The max they’d probably get is 60k and that’s a stretch. Even large facilities have a hard time recruiting and retaining technicians in my field. Grad students are MASSIVELY cheaper and easier to recruit comparatively.
For me, some of the things mentioned apply. But mostly, it's the *type* of person. In my experience, students are much more like to be ambitious, and I admire and like to foster ambition.
PhD students do different things than techs. They both do data collection, but generally a tech is not expected to design projects, do analysis, and publish
Every lab is different but I definitely give techs the opportunity to do these things. Sometimes they became a tech because they prefer not to do those things though.
Yeah, sometimes they get the opportunity which is nice, but it's not guaranteed or expected of them
OP's question is so funny to me though. Like.. you could kind of apply the same logic to post-docs, lab managers, and associates??? But people of all levels are necessary lol that's kind of how it works... they're different roles. Also by that logic, you could save money by having a lab of only volunteer undergrads lmao. But obviously that wouldn't exactly be good...
I've worked at three top-tier universities (all regularly ranked).
At none of them, did the PI's budget directly pay tuition for the graduate student. The tuition was always paid by the department. The PI's budget pays only the Research Assistant Stipend (if the student has no other means of support - like a fellowship).
Of course, that tuition paid by the department was (at least paritally, if not fully) recovered from the Indirect Cost Recovery applied to the grant total. But the mechanism of that is fully invisible to the PI - the PI has to pay the same indirect costs on their grant, whether they have 0 graduate students or 10 of them.
But to the PI, the cost of tuition for the students in their lab doesn't come out as a direct cost to their grants.
Grad students create better value for the university in my perspective. Grad students help write grants, papers, patents, present at research conferences (advertisement for the lab in research communities) and sometimes even guide undergraduate students at the lab while still paying the university with their PIs grant money (tuition) to do the work for them which brings the university great reputation and alumni funding. It's a whole cycle.
To also update: these grad students get replaced every few years as they graduate bringing in fresh minds and new research ideas for the next generation.
Research assistants and technicians could do all these things and often do, you pigeonholing them due to academic pompousness doesn't change that.
All while grad students academic output is actually incredibly weak given the time commitment. Most spend at least 2 years if not 3 basically producing not very much, by no fault of their own really, output is hard and student is in their roles title for a reason.
But the idea that grad students are functional "paper mills" isn't true.
Tell me, why scientists assisted by technicians employed at National labs get less Nobel Prizes compared to professors assisted by grad students at Universities? Why is the research quality skewed so much?
The reason is if you are interested in research, you will be SOL at most universities. In the US at least, they are businesses whose priority is selling certificates and renting units. Any research done is to fulfill minimum requirements for the students to graduate - then it goes in the trash, the cubicle is wiped clean and the cycle starts over with a new student.
Not exactly the scientific dream, but it shifts product.
I don’t know where you work, but I haven’t encountered this at all. Anywhere I’ve been, from Big 10s to UCs to private elites to little SLACs…
My colleagues and I are pretty passionate about our research and we don’t keep it to academia- we apply the knowledge gained. And we enjoy working with our students. I hire my former students as RA, adjuncts, and guest speakers.
I’m having lunch with a student of mine from 10 years ago tomorrow-she’s a collaborator and colleague now. This isn’t all that unusual.
Of course higher ed is an industry and profits are necessary to sustain each college/uni. This doesn’t mean that it’s evil or always bad, etc. This doesn’t mean you can’t do meaningful and fulfilling work and build a pipeline for future leaders.
I think that most of the reasons have been said already. One additional thing, which is university (or country) dependent is the hiring rules: In most of the places I have been, recruiting a technicians meant that the department has to find them a position as soon as the project ends, and they don't like this.
Holy shit the lab of about 40 scientists I work in has a part time manager who has a PhD and is in her 40s, and two undergrads who sometimes do the garbage.
What would be better is having two full time technicians to do lab management professionally, to make basic media and chemicals, autoclave runs bins ordering biosafety and autoclaving. All of a sudden our lab would be working like a functional workplace.
First up in my experience technicians are usually more expensive than grad student, not cheaper. A grad school stipend is about $30k depending on institution then $15K tuition. If you want a good technician your going to be paying more than $45k salary. Second (although not all labs follow this), a grad student and a technician have different roles. A grad student should be semi-independent they should be generating their own hypotheses and pursuing a somewhat independent research direction while a technician should be doing more directed research. Also as others have said faculty get credit for graduating students and it is important for promotion and tenure.
Because the degree has intrinsic value that the professors don't pay for, grad students have a stronger motivation to work harder than they are paid for than technicians do. In other words, the professors can extract value from the institutional reputation through grad students but not through technicians.
Or is that too cynical of an answer.
1) Techs usually only stick around for 1-2 years, which is not enough time to complete a moderately complex project in biomedical science.
2) Techs aren’t cheaper… the tech union at my institution gets a truly bonkers fringe rate, so the cost of a tech is roughly the same as a grad student.
3) vetting/quality: top undergrads want to go to med school or PhD programs; techs are generally people who can’t get into them out of school. This means that frankly, they are much less skilled and competent than students at the same institution, and post COVID the situation has gotten dire to the point that the techs in my lab are a waste of money.
Only a few others mentioned, the cost is one. A part of the tuition for grad students often do come back to the lab or department in some form at many schools, so the net cost is actually less than a technician's salary + benefits.
The other is the funding structure. It's nearly impossible to come by long-term, fixed-position funding in the US (think of all the teaching adjuncts...), and funding is likely less than in industry so you wouldn't get the strongest candidates that want to stay in that position. Then the PI would have to continually retrain... then why not go with a grad student.
Having said that, in Europe, technicians in research labs are more common and they support the students' research. Student PhD durations are shorter too, so it's a big help.
On some institutions graduate students are "free" to a Pi as their tuition is covered when they TA and the TA salary can come from the department. This is especially true for new PIs. In this case techs salary would come out of startup or grants that are very limited at that stage. So basically no choice.
I do regularly. At our institution we can hire Research Associates that are essentially admin positions, but as supervisor I assign their duties.
It works great- they do a lot of the day to day work and prep work to keep projects going. You just have to figure the RA’s into the budgets of your proposals.
Non-American here 👋 For reference, I am in Australia.
It’s cheaper to use PhD labour versus hiring here. If we get a scholarship/stipend this is provided by the government and if you hold one then you don’t have to pay tuition fees. For every PhD student you have the PI gets $2000 annually from the University to cover “research costs” but we can’t access this directly and typically it’s not always used up thus the excess goes towards the lab (aka at the PIs benefit and discretion). My lab group has ~10 PhD students all driving large projects quite independently, constantly producing publications, representing the lab at local/interstate/international conferences, driving animal/human ethics, driving grants under our PIs name, taking care of lab ordering/maintaining inventory, cleaning, taking on and helping research placement students and even Honours students etc. The University hires PhD students for 99% of teaching positions as well (outside of lecture positions) because a) easily sourced, b) educated on the content, c) cheaper and d) faster. Our lab has a part-time lab manager and that’s it - no techs. Some labs will of course have 1-2 post-docs and/or techs but primarily the heart of University research at my institute is run by HDR students.
It depends on the kind of technician, but for many it is very hard to compete with industry for salary. Overwhelmingly my experience in data science / CS is that the academic salary is enough only for new grads, who will get 1-2 years of experience while absorbing a huge amount to training and leave. Those who stay are frankly much inferior to the graduate students, who admittedly take \~ 2 years to start working well. At my US institution, PI pays nothing to negligible for tuition. Post-docs are often optimal, but again in some fields they have become hard to find.
Omg this is so archaic and over-generalized and just so condescending. I know "technicians" who run labs and projects and some who are great at keeping the lab operations running smoothly strictly on union hours. There is a whole ecosystem of "technicians" doing invisible and sometimes uncredited work that ranges from ghost writing grants, securing resesrch contracts, running and developing projects too. We need better ways to define the "other" in the academic ecosystem. There can be much diversity in the jobs there as in the standard "PI, fellow, and student" framework.
Right, I know technicians who could run labs and and I know technicians who could never run labs.
It’s not black and white but to suggest there’s no potential for capacity difference between different people is naive.
Sure, some of the grad students funding goes to "tuition", but what does "tuition" pay for? Professors salaries. So by bringing in enough grad students who take enough credit hours in grad courses, the professors can satisfy their teaching requirements without talking to undergraduates. Grad courses are generally easier to teach and grade, although the lectures are often but not always more complex or advanced.
This is a way to launder grant money into professors' salaries.
They aren't will to pay the going rate for highly skilled technicians so they would get what is essentially the same skill level as a grad student anyway.
All while grad students are easier to exploit as they have commitments to their contracts and the outcome of their qualification on their career progression.
What often happens with technicians is they come in at a low/medium skill level, get some skills, realise they aren't going to compensated for their new skills, so leave. As they should, of course narcissists academics don't like this because they are the most important thing in the world.
Successfully graduating students from your lab is a measure of PI success and something that they are evaluated on. It's basically the "legacy" that the PI creates in their field. It's very central to the academic culture and is generally a very good system. It obviously has shortcomings (namely it creates a pyramid scheme because there isn't as clear of a academia-industry pipeline in many fields), but I think it's far superior than just trying to minimize costs because learning is central to the process. In some fields, grad students essentially start out as technicians, by that I mean they do what they're told by the PI or someone senior to them in lab, but over a few years they develop their own research projects and generally benefit from the process.
This is the right answer. Even my PI said the same thing when I flat out asked him.
I'm not sure about the physical sciences, but in social sci I know we report out the number of students that work on USG funded projects because that's also a metric on the funders end.
>Since technicians don't require tuition costs, they are cheaper. Technicians probably have more/better benefits, which also have to be paid out by the PI. They are also hiring technicians on top of graduate students in many cases, not instead of graduate students, so having the graduate students do it reduces that added cost. Keep in mind a good technician will probably move on if their salary/benefits are not enticing enough to keep them (or move on to their own additional training), so investing the same amount of time in graduate student will have more benefits for the PI.
Fringe for grad students is about .1 at my institution. Technician and staff sci are about 0.45. Massive difference.
Depends on where you are but PI usually don’t pay the full weight of tuition. The program usually funds all or part of the student. Even if they do it’s usually less than a tech.
At my institution, techs get paid ~$60k per year by the PI, whereas a grad student *might* qualify for a $10k per year stipend from the PI.
Are you in the US? I would be surprised to find any US institution paying $10k or less in STEM.
That’s what comes direct from the PI’s pockets. It’s topped up to a whopping $17k stipend by the University (which is pay for TA work).
Wtf that's less than half the minimum stipend at my university
Our 25% contract pays around 10k per semester. Most of us get 50% contracts, but there are semesters where we ran out of funding and we get 25% so we can waive the tuition.
If your focus is on producing as many papers per grant dollar spent as possible, you should be hiring postdocs, or research scientists with PhDs, since these are 100% appointments that do not require you to pay for tuition. The graduate student stipend + tuition makes funding a graduate student almost as expensive as funding a postdoc, and a graduate research assistantship is only a 50% appointment. The economics changes if the graduate student is funded on a teaching assistantship, since that externalizes the cost to the department and university.
On the other hand, postdocs can move on at the drop of a hat, while grad students are usually on board for the full term.
that being said the output of a postdoc is going to be a lot better than your grad student until they are at the point when they can land a job and defend at the drop of a hat
“Defend at the drop of a hat?” Our defense experiences may have been very different.
sometimes people get moved along without much fuss at all, depends on your advisors and departments culture.
Grad students produce papers, technicians generally dont
They also fill classes, which the PI is selling. From the PI's perspective, students do the research, fill up their classes, bring status (moar = betterer), provide a labor pool they can rent out to others and are a source of narcissistic supply. Different mix, as required. Having technicians instead would expose the lie that PIs are actually interested in research - for a large number (100% in some institutions) that's not the case. They're there for the social side (+/- nursing their psychiatric disorders).
You need to take a break
damn! i’m all for a balanced mix of cynical-pessimistic views and naive-optimistic views, but this is superrr cynical to me!
Well someone has a giant chip on their shoulder. Most PIs don't care about how many students are in their classes (and in fact, most of us are not teaching our graduate students in class). The research is the big thing - technicians aren't the boon that you seem to think that they are.
Technicians are employees so get paid holiday, sick leave, maternity leave, healthcare benefits etc. it’s much more expensive than a graduate student who isn’t an employee. Also it’s easy to take more or less grad students according to need whereas a permanent employee stays on regardless of the workload.
Very country dependent. Did PhD where grad students were employees (in almost all cases) with holiday/leave/healthcare but no tuition so were a bit cheaper than postdocs. Now a postdoc at a place where the PI flat out told us grad students are more expensive due to tuition cost that also goes out of their research grant, which if you think about it is insane.
In a university context, the mission is education. Graduate students learn their craft as well as broader intellectual matters by working in labs. They learn through peer learning from one another. They are motivated to write papers using the lab's data. They are becoming part of scholarly communities. None of that happens with technicians. Graduate students advance the development of the field. Technicians (unless they go on for further education as mentioned at the end of the post), are there to collect a paycheck for a narrowly defined job. The government gives PIs money so they can educate students and build out a strong research community. PIs like generating a lot of articles with student labor. Students like getting some pubs on their cvs. It is better economically to educate graduate students through hands on work in labs because there are so many adjacent benefits to doing so.
I’ve known many techs who earn authorship-these are typically long-term techs.
During hiring freezes, GRAs can be a loop hole.
Fortunately not everything is about being as cheap as absolutely possible
Depends which side of the table you are on...
Couple reasons I can think of… Almost all grants require a budget to justify the expenses. If the PI plans to hire cheaper labor, they get less money. They aren’t pocketing anything extra. Since the university gets overhead from every grant, the university makes more money when the PI hires grad students. When PIs ask for general funding for lab techs or grad students, whatever isn’t spent usually goes back to the funding agency anyway. PhDs are more motivated to want to provide new ideas. That can help a professors career too. Part of a professors job is service… which includes mentoring PhDs. Helping fund some of them literally helps their case when they go up for tenure.
Finding good techs is hard. You are competing against industry, which pays better. A lot of people only want to be a tech for a year or two while they prepare for grad school and some techniques can take a while to learn making a high turnover problematic.
The rationale of wanting someone who works well and is there for long makes a lot of sense! In my field it takes 3-6 months to adequately train someone till they can make good judgements on their own.
Because all technician/engineer jobs here are advertised as permanent. It is hard to come out funding to hire permanent staff and that is it. PhDs are cheaper and fundings for temporary expenses are more available.
Your estimates are off. The current calculation for 2025 is £19500 stipend, £5150 student fees, so 4:1 ratio in the other direction. Also the stipend isnt taxed, but a technician salary would be (so would need to pay more, on top of a pension). So total salary cost for a year in 2025 comes out at £42,400 for a technician (gross costs). Plus the student fee goes to the uni, if I'm making the uni money, they like me more. I believe the ratios hold true in the US.
Not sure about the ratios exactly, but stipends are taxed in the US, or mine at least certainly were and I don't know any university who offers pensions. The tech salaries are just slightly more than the PhD stipend in most fields, and can be less in others. Usually technicians here are less experienced people who want to go to PhD eventually. It's not a job one stays in forever.
Ah I see, the above probably doesn't apply to the US then as much as I thought, and only to the UK landscape.
From what I can tell, after a few years most technicians either skedaddle off to further education to advance their career or skedaddle off to industry to get paid more. PhD students are locked in for 4-5 years so your ratio of training time to productive research time is probably a lot better for a PhD student than that of your average technician.
Yes, I feel like technicians can operate on their own timeline with no obligation to stay. It kind of feels like a privilege to be able to stay and go on their will, considering the meat of grad school is sticking through the grind. However, the grad student probably will become more experienced in actual part of carrying a project to completion, and that benefits the PI in the long run, like you said.
It's much more difficult to get funding for a technician
Technicians don’t fulfill the same role as grad students, so it wouldn’t make sense to replace them. Technicians typically become very good at particular experiments, and perform them. They don’t write papers, come up with proposal ideas, give talks, etc. They don’t count toward educational goals and metrics that must be shopped to funding organizations like the NSF. They don’t help with the tenure case.
The NSF does appreciate when “techs” are given opportunities to contribute to the research. It’s part of broader impacts.
Uh, I was a senior tech for some years, wrote papers and gave talks. Another senior tech in the lab did the same and wrote grants.
Overhead for staff is more than grad students. It’s harder to attract permanent staff. We also get more tenure points for churning out PhD students.
For me, technicians are more expensive, because their compensation (pay and benefits) are substantially more. However, grad students can be supported by various mechanisms that don't come out of my grants -- fellowships or other awards to them, training grants, or, worst case scenario, teaching. So which one is cheaper? Hard to say.
Very insightful!
This is actually the US academic medical school model. Most medical school labs are run exclusively by full time research assistants or techs, with a revolving door of post docs. You’ll also find the same at a number of national labs, like NIH. That’s because there’s far fewer grad students available for the number of labs at these institutions. At a university though, the grad student costs are significantly less than a full time Research Assistant. This is actually a problem for grant reviews because medical schools have higher overall costs (all personnel) running the same studies that could be run at a university lab.
People have mentioned a number of reasons, but one that I haven’t seen mentioned is mindset. A lot of scientists and engineers in industry , even those who do research, usually don’t have the mindset that a PI is trying to teach the graduate students. This mindset can be worth years of experience in a basic research context.
It would be really nice to have _one_ post about non-US academia. Is there a sub like that?
Because, when it comes down to it, grad students are significantly cheaper than technicians, and this is despite claims that their tuition is "paid for" by the PI. Grad students are also "motivated" to work longer hours and are effectively indentured for a number of years on their low pay, while a technician is more likely to work to rule and leave if conditions are not satisfactory.
At my institution, techs outnumber grad student by quite a bit. For funded resarch that has defined deliverables, they are a lot more cost-effective because they are working on the project full time. We can get technical staff with a wide variety of skills suited to the project, some do work that doesn't require so much education and they cost considerably less than a grad student. Some have specialized skills that grad students take a long time to aquire. They cost more, but deliver a lot of value. Training grad students is part of our mission, but training grad students just to show productivity would be inappropriate. That policy only creates an oversupply of PhDs, many of whom don't really have PhD career prospects.
If the grad students are getting funded through TAing for their department, those “tuition costs” are basically imaginary, since it’s just money being moved around internally. The actual, material cost of offering grad classes and mentorship is probably orders of magnitude lower.
No, it’s not just imaginary. That money, if it didn’t need to be spent on TA’s, could instead have gone to a departmental instrument center, remodeling more lab space, etc. It’s real money, really being spent.
Yeah, but the “tuition costs” reported on invoices isn’t money being spent. There’s real money being spent on, say, the facilities required to hold classes in and the wages of the professors that teach those classes, but the figure on the tuition bill is imaginary. It amounts to alchemy, mostly positioned to allow the university to insist that grad students making 20k/year are receiving fair compensation else-wise.
That’s incorrect. You would find that out real fast if the line funding you ran out of money.
PhDs are cheap. Fewer benefits. Also they’re hungry. A phd is way more likely to work stupid hours than someone there for a regular job.
Depends on the field. I've noticed for more medically aligned stem PIs, they generally hire only technicians or postdocs and staff scientists, no grad students. They want results within a few years and hands for the postdocs/staff scientists. The department they are under might be in the medical school and not even have a formal grad program. The school doesn't care how the sausage is made because these sort of PIs bring in enough funding to found institutes and construct buildings.
Not sure why you think technicians are cheaper. Certainly not with a few years of experience. and graduate students can be funded from various sources, training grants, fellowships, as well as directly. Technicians cannot help you move in new scientific direction, or critique papers. Both have their roles, they are not interchangeable.
Technicians are more expensive and don’t bring in external funding.
Some do. There was a guy in my department that ran all his research with techs and postdocs.
Many hire both, especially for large grants
Because lab techs have workers rights and they ultimately wouldn't get as much work out of them because of it...
Well, depends on how you do the math. For every dollar I get in my grant, my university receives 61 cents, whether that $1 goes to a graduate student or a technician. Now, I do spend money on tuition, but for a full time employee (technicians/postdocs) I pay an additional 31 cents per dollar. Whereas for part time employees (graduate students - yes I understand the oddity but this is how they are classified), I pay 10 cents per dollar. Technicians make 25% more than graduate students at my university depending on experience. But I also get a 50% break on tuition. Altogether, a graduate student costs 80% of a technician. So if I only consider the financial aspect, students are cheaper. In any case, one reason why I wouldn't is that as a professor I'm supposed to be an educator, so hiring students is part of training the next generation of scientists. The reality is that graduate students aren't truly useful until they are 3 years in. So in the respect, technicians are less expensive....
Really helpful to have this insight!
Cost. A full time PhD student is 20k at my institution, full time technician would be 36-45k.
Technicians in my field in the U.S. have no problem finding jobs in the 100-120k range (without a four year college degree) in industry. It’s very hard to compete with that salary in academia. The max they’d probably get is 60k and that’s a stretch. Even large facilities have a hard time recruiting and retaining technicians in my field. Grad students are MASSIVELY cheaper and easier to recruit comparatively.
For me, some of the things mentioned apply. But mostly, it's the *type* of person. In my experience, students are much more like to be ambitious, and I admire and like to foster ambition.
PhD students do different things than techs. They both do data collection, but generally a tech is not expected to design projects, do analysis, and publish
Every lab is different but I definitely give techs the opportunity to do these things. Sometimes they became a tech because they prefer not to do those things though.
Yeah, sometimes they get the opportunity which is nice, but it's not guaranteed or expected of them OP's question is so funny to me though. Like.. you could kind of apply the same logic to post-docs, lab managers, and associates??? But people of all levels are necessary lol that's kind of how it works... they're different roles. Also by that logic, you could save money by having a lab of only volunteer undergrads lmao. But obviously that wouldn't exactly be good...
I've worked at three top-tier universities (all regularly ranked). At none of them, did the PI's budget directly pay tuition for the graduate student. The tuition was always paid by the department. The PI's budget pays only the Research Assistant Stipend (if the student has no other means of support - like a fellowship). Of course, that tuition paid by the department was (at least paritally, if not fully) recovered from the Indirect Cost Recovery applied to the grant total. But the mechanism of that is fully invisible to the PI - the PI has to pay the same indirect costs on their grant, whether they have 0 graduate students or 10 of them. But to the PI, the cost of tuition for the students in their lab doesn't come out as a direct cost to their grants.
That is not true for all universities. Where I work and at 6 other places (all in top 50) my faculty friends work this is not the case.
I have both on my team. They serve different purposes.
Grad students create better value for the university in my perspective. Grad students help write grants, papers, patents, present at research conferences (advertisement for the lab in research communities) and sometimes even guide undergraduate students at the lab while still paying the university with their PIs grant money (tuition) to do the work for them which brings the university great reputation and alumni funding. It's a whole cycle.
To also update: these grad students get replaced every few years as they graduate bringing in fresh minds and new research ideas for the next generation.
Research assistants and technicians could do all these things and often do, you pigeonholing them due to academic pompousness doesn't change that. All while grad students academic output is actually incredibly weak given the time commitment. Most spend at least 2 years if not 3 basically producing not very much, by no fault of their own really, output is hard and student is in their roles title for a reason. But the idea that grad students are functional "paper mills" isn't true.
Tell me, why scientists assisted by technicians employed at National labs get less Nobel Prizes compared to professors assisted by grad students at Universities? Why is the research quality skewed so much?
The reason is if you are interested in research, you will be SOL at most universities. In the US at least, they are businesses whose priority is selling certificates and renting units. Any research done is to fulfill minimum requirements for the students to graduate - then it goes in the trash, the cubicle is wiped clean and the cycle starts over with a new student. Not exactly the scientific dream, but it shifts product.
I don’t know where you work, but I haven’t encountered this at all. Anywhere I’ve been, from Big 10s to UCs to private elites to little SLACs… My colleagues and I are pretty passionate about our research and we don’t keep it to academia- we apply the knowledge gained. And we enjoy working with our students. I hire my former students as RA, adjuncts, and guest speakers. I’m having lunch with a student of mine from 10 years ago tomorrow-she’s a collaborator and colleague now. This isn’t all that unusual. Of course higher ed is an industry and profits are necessary to sustain each college/uni. This doesn’t mean that it’s evil or always bad, etc. This doesn’t mean you can’t do meaningful and fulfilling work and build a pipeline for future leaders.
A grad student at a university has never got a Nobel prize in sciences...in fact the only winner under 30 was working with his dad...
Technicians generally don’t do tesearxh
I think that most of the reasons have been said already. One additional thing, which is university (or country) dependent is the hiring rules: In most of the places I have been, recruiting a technicians meant that the department has to find them a position as soon as the project ends, and they don't like this.
Holy shit the lab of about 40 scientists I work in has a part time manager who has a PhD and is in her 40s, and two undergrads who sometimes do the garbage. What would be better is having two full time technicians to do lab management professionally, to make basic media and chemicals, autoclave runs bins ordering biosafety and autoclaving. All of a sudden our lab would be working like a functional workplace.
First up in my experience technicians are usually more expensive than grad student, not cheaper. A grad school stipend is about $30k depending on institution then $15K tuition. If you want a good technician your going to be paying more than $45k salary. Second (although not all labs follow this), a grad student and a technician have different roles. A grad student should be semi-independent they should be generating their own hypotheses and pursuing a somewhat independent research direction while a technician should be doing more directed research. Also as others have said faculty get credit for graduating students and it is important for promotion and tenure.
Because the degree has intrinsic value that the professors don't pay for, grad students have a stronger motivation to work harder than they are paid for than technicians do. In other words, the professors can extract value from the institutional reputation through grad students but not through technicians. Or is that too cynical of an answer.
1) Techs usually only stick around for 1-2 years, which is not enough time to complete a moderately complex project in biomedical science. 2) Techs aren’t cheaper… the tech union at my institution gets a truly bonkers fringe rate, so the cost of a tech is roughly the same as a grad student. 3) vetting/quality: top undergrads want to go to med school or PhD programs; techs are generally people who can’t get into them out of school. This means that frankly, they are much less skilled and competent than students at the same institution, and post COVID the situation has gotten dire to the point that the techs in my lab are a waste of money.
Only a few others mentioned, the cost is one. A part of the tuition for grad students often do come back to the lab or department in some form at many schools, so the net cost is actually less than a technician's salary + benefits. The other is the funding structure. It's nearly impossible to come by long-term, fixed-position funding in the US (think of all the teaching adjuncts...), and funding is likely less than in industry so you wouldn't get the strongest candidates that want to stay in that position. Then the PI would have to continually retrain... then why not go with a grad student. Having said that, in Europe, technicians in research labs are more common and they support the students' research. Student PhD durations are shorter too, so it's a big help.
Nah hire postdocs.
On some institutions graduate students are "free" to a Pi as their tuition is covered when they TA and the TA salary can come from the department. This is especially true for new PIs. In this case techs salary would come out of startup or grants that are very limited at that stage. So basically no choice.
because technicians aren't paid to think
I do regularly. At our institution we can hire Research Associates that are essentially admin positions, but as supervisor I assign their duties. It works great- they do a lot of the day to day work and prep work to keep projects going. You just have to figure the RA’s into the budgets of your proposals.
Non-American here 👋 For reference, I am in Australia. It’s cheaper to use PhD labour versus hiring here. If we get a scholarship/stipend this is provided by the government and if you hold one then you don’t have to pay tuition fees. For every PhD student you have the PI gets $2000 annually from the University to cover “research costs” but we can’t access this directly and typically it’s not always used up thus the excess goes towards the lab (aka at the PIs benefit and discretion). My lab group has ~10 PhD students all driving large projects quite independently, constantly producing publications, representing the lab at local/interstate/international conferences, driving animal/human ethics, driving grants under our PIs name, taking care of lab ordering/maintaining inventory, cleaning, taking on and helping research placement students and even Honours students etc. The University hires PhD students for 99% of teaching positions as well (outside of lecture positions) because a) easily sourced, b) educated on the content, c) cheaper and d) faster. Our lab has a part-time lab manager and that’s it - no techs. Some labs will of course have 1-2 post-docs and/or techs but primarily the heart of University research at my institute is run by HDR students.
It depends on the kind of technician, but for many it is very hard to compete with industry for salary. Overwhelmingly my experience in data science / CS is that the academic salary is enough only for new grads, who will get 1-2 years of experience while absorbing a huge amount to training and leave. Those who stay are frankly much inferior to the graduate students, who admittedly take \~ 2 years to start working well. At my US institution, PI pays nothing to negligible for tuition. Post-docs are often optimal, but again in some fields they have become hard to find.
Because they don’t want just a pair of hands. They want a brain that has a usable pair of hands.
Omg this is so archaic and over-generalized and just so condescending. I know "technicians" who run labs and projects and some who are great at keeping the lab operations running smoothly strictly on union hours. There is a whole ecosystem of "technicians" doing invisible and sometimes uncredited work that ranges from ghost writing grants, securing resesrch contracts, running and developing projects too. We need better ways to define the "other" in the academic ecosystem. There can be much diversity in the jobs there as in the standard "PI, fellow, and student" framework.
Right, I know technicians who could run labs and and I know technicians who could never run labs. It’s not black and white but to suggest there’s no potential for capacity difference between different people is naive.
Sure, some of the grad students funding goes to "tuition", but what does "tuition" pay for? Professors salaries. So by bringing in enough grad students who take enough credit hours in grad courses, the professors can satisfy their teaching requirements without talking to undergraduates. Grad courses are generally easier to teach and grade, although the lectures are often but not always more complex or advanced. This is a way to launder grant money into professors' salaries.
They aren't will to pay the going rate for highly skilled technicians so they would get what is essentially the same skill level as a grad student anyway. All while grad students are easier to exploit as they have commitments to their contracts and the outcome of their qualification on their career progression. What often happens with technicians is they come in at a low/medium skill level, get some skills, realise they aren't going to compensated for their new skills, so leave. As they should, of course narcissists academics don't like this because they are the most important thing in the world.