Those of us working in research careers can invariably share stories about working as a research assistant, cleaning datasets, coding, running models, doing literature reviews, and many of the other less-glamorous tasks that make up the research process. That was a key aspect of our apprenticeship into the world of research, and a gateway into a research career. But how important really is research assistance as an entry point into a research career?
That is the question addressed in this 2025 NBER Working Paper (ungated version here) by Ina Ganguli (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) and Raviv Murciano-Goroff (Boston University). They look at the impact of working in a university lab (an important subset of research assistance work) on subsequently pursuing a scientific career. Interestingly, Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff use changes in the local minimum wage as an exogenous source of variation in lab employment, so this paper also indirectly contributes to the literature on the employment effects of the minimum wage, in a context (research labs) that is not often the focus of that literature.
Their data comes from UMETRICS, which collates data on research grants across universities, and their dataset covers 32 universities over the period from 2000 to 2019 (although the dataset has coverage up to 2022, including those additional years would mean having to account for the COVID-19 pandemic).
First, using a dataset collated at the lab level, Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff use a staggered difference-in-differences approach to look at the impact of minimum wage changes on employment of undergraduates in the labs. This analysis essentially compares the change in undergraduate employment between the time before and the time after an increase in the minimum wage, between university labs that were affected by the minimum wage increase and those that were not. In that analysis, they find that:
...following minimum wage increases, labs decrease the employment of undergraduates by 7.4% on average...
So, not dissimilar to the literature on minimum wage effects on employment, when focused on young people in exposed occupations. Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff then use the minimum wage change as an instrument for students' exposure to laboratory research as an undergraduate. The key assumption is that minimum wages while an undergraduate affect later scientific careers only through their effect on lab employment opportunities.
Using a dataset of over 28,000 undergraduates and their subsequent career paths, Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff find that:
...decreased exposure to scientific work translates into significantly lower rates of undergraduate research assistants pursuing doctoral degrees or working in the life sciences sector after graduation. We find that working one fewer quarter in a lab during an undergrad student’s college years translates into between a 7.0 and 10.3 percentage point decrease in the rate of enrolling in a doctoral-level program. Given our sample of 28,283 students, this implies that if all students had experienced a minimum wage increase, roughly 500 fewer undergraduates in our sample would have pursued these advanced degrees.
So, the results imply that one fewer quarter of lab experience as an undergraduate reduces enrolment in a doctoral programme by 7.0 to 10.3 percentage points. That is a fairly large effect and should make graduate research programmes take notice of the importance of undergraduate research assistance opportunities for the pipeline into graduate research.
So, working in a lab as an undergraduate is a key pathway towards a career in the life sciences, and when those opportunities are restricted, students are less likely to embark on such a career. These results won't be too surprising to those of us who have been through an apprenticeship as a researcher. It is likely that I would be doing something very different right now if I hadn't been pulled into a lot of research projects towards the end of my undergraduate studies. I almost certainly wouldn't have pursued a PhD, or become an academic. Research assistant jobs are more than just jobs. They provide mentoring, information, skills, networks, references, and a chance to try out being a researcher in a safe setting.
These results also highlight two other things for me. First, they suggest that minimum wage increases may have a negative impact on the career pipeline into science. I'm unsure that this negative impact of the minimum wage has been identified before. However, we should be cautious because Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff are primarily interested in using minimum wage changes to identify the effect of undergraduate research experience on later careers, rather than estimating the overall long-run consequences of minimum wage increases for the scientific workforce. Nevertheless, their results suggest that this may be an important unintended consequence of higher minimum wages, and one that would be worth further research.
Second, given that research assistants do a lot of the 'drudge work' in research, if generative AI is also able to do a lot of that work, that further suggests a negative impact on the career pipeline into science through the rise of generative AI. I know others have written on this before (see here), so the challenge here is not a new idea.
On the plus side, that suggests another method that could be used to further test for the impacts of undergraduate (and graduate) research assistance on future academic careers, beyond focusing on life sciences (as Ganguli and Murciano-Goroff do). By comparing academic fields that are more (or less) exposed to generative AI (especially in the early days of generative AI), we might be able to tease out how important research assistance is to future academic careers across many fields.
Research apprenticeship is important, and these results give us a clear indication of how important it can be. Cleaning data, running models, searching the literature, and doing all the other seemingly mundane tasks of a research assistant are not just cheap ways for senior researchers to get research done. They are also how the next generation of researchers learns what research is, discovers whether they enjoy doing it, and gets started on a research career. If these opportunities are reduced, whether through higher minimum wages or through substitution by generative AI, we may save on some of the drudge work today, but at the cost of having fewer researchers tomorrow.
[HT: Marginal Revolution]
