alt Hacker NewsYou may well know this, but I get the sense that it isn’t necessarily common knowledge, so I want to spell it out anyway:
In a lot of cases, the salary for a grad student or tech is small potatoes next to the cost of the consumables they use in their work.
For example,I work for a lab that does a lot of sequencing, and if we’re busy one tech can use 10k worth of reagents in a week.
We are on the comment section about an AI conference and up until the last few years material/hardware costs for computer science research was very cheap compare to other sciences like medicine, biology etc. where they use bespoke instruments and materials. In CS, up until very recently, all you needed was a good consumer PC for each grad student that lasted for many years. Nowadays GPU clusters are more needed but funding is generally not keeping up with that, so even good university labs are way underresourced on this front.