I’m a researcher at an R1 and I love working with undergraduates. But it’s not true that they’re a huge source of additional resources. Quite the opposite: like

I’m a researcher at an R1 and I love working with undergraduates. But it’s not true that they’re a huge source of additional resources. Quite the opposite: like any new researchers they have to be carefully supervised, which means they can actually consume a lot of time from PIs and PhD students (you can send them off on their own without supervision, but that’s how you get low quality results.) Unlike PhD students, however, undergrads tend to graduate just as they’ve finally learned the ropes. It’s still worthwhile because a few of my undergrad research interns did great work, and at least a couple of them applied to PhD programs (at least two in my lab; they’re both Assistant Professors at top CS departments.) But the answer to a resource allocation problem is almost never “here’s a simple idea that makes the resource limits go away, why aren’t people doing that.” Unfortunately.