The issue isn’t with high school kids studying some science, Econ, or humanities related topic, much less that they wrote a paper. The issue is that they are calling this stuff “published” or “peer reviewed” research, and suggesting it’s on par with academic research.
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What happens near us is that PIs are pressured by the heads of ther institution to take these students into their labs so the institution can benefit from an extra source of income. PIs generally try to get out of it, but some will get a PhD candidate or lab tech to create busy work, and make sure the kids don’t use any expensive materials or equipment.It’s a fine way to be exposed to the grind of bench research, and maybe learn to crunch data, but teenagers are not designing experiments, or even formulating valuable hypotheses.
Some high school students with stats knowledge can aggravate data already collected, and possibly come up with an interesdting correlation. Others create social science questionnaires and maybe get enough responses to show something meaningful. But if high school students could truly produce work worthy of peer review and publication, why would they need to go to undergrad?
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At the local to me T20 there are many high schoolers doing research, I personally know of over a dozen who have down this over the last five years or so.
One got their gig from sending a cold email to a prof, some from parental or neighborhood or teacher connections, others are students at a local stem focused private HS so I assume there’s some kind of arrangement there. Some of these students were doing hands on activities, such as harvesting organs from baby chicks, according to protocol.
I don’t know why this college can take so many high schoolers on for research, or whether the profs and staff are pressured to take students, but if I know this many students doing research there, that means there are many more…clearly there aren’t enough undergrads and grad students to fill all the roles. I don’t know of any high school students who have been published this way though, at least in time for college apps.
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Participation in research is a great experience, if good mentors have the time to direct it. It’s participation and following directions, though. It’s not what many people (likely including AOs) think.
I know many high school students doing research, submitting to Regeneron, etc. No one is doing anything as hands on as harvesting organs from baby chicks!
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I am an academic/administrator and still act as a peer reviewer for a fairly selective journal (I have a “revise and resubmit” submission sitting in my in box that I need to review).
Working in a lab is highly valuable work, even if someone has a relatively mundane or menial task. But it should not be confused with the phrases “conducting research” or “publishing research” especially if the “research” winds up in a journal with little editing, major undisclosed conflicts of interests, and few objective standards for selection.
Is this any worse than the other gambits people use to get a leg up on admissions? I can’t answer that one. But it is frustrating for those of us who work in academia itself and who want to instill good research habits in the next generation of scholars. As others have already pointed out, academic research of any discipline — if it’s any good- takes years to develop and perfect. It can be boring. It will require you to take tons of foundational courses and memorize gobs of material. It will feature red herrings and wrong turns and uncertain paths. And even when you get it right, it will be infused with your discipline’s politics, your talent for conveying your ideas in conference settings and in conversations with deans and potential funders, and a dose of good or bad luck.
I don’t expect a high school student to know the difference between real research and the racket(s) described in the Pro Publica article. I do, however, expect better of U Penn. They should know better.
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I don’t disagree.
Adding, I don’t believe that AOs can sort thru the vagaries of what constitutes ‘research’ at all in the 6-8 minute average time they take to read an app.
Many counselors have lamented Penn calling out that a third of their admits had done ‘research’…that ratchets up the perceived value of that EC not only at Penn but at all their peers, and at schools the next step down, and so on.
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If a high schooler participates in research with the intent of learning about the research process without caring about the end output, that’s great. But if they go in expecting to get their name on a paper by the end of the summer because that’s what their $10k package promises, it’s just so very wrong.
One thing that doesn’t seem to get mentioned is, PIs sometimes like to have high schoolers in their labs. Not because they need the “bodies” to turn a wrench, but as a token. It shows that they care about outreach activities and the local community, whether sincere or not. Having a picture or two of high schoolers doing experiments also enhances their research homepage.
High schoolers’ participation can also be used as nuggets on a PI’s research proposals, such as those to the National Science Foundation, which require PIs to talk about broader impacts of their proposed research, a part of which can be their outreach activities. So keeping a few high schoolers around — especially if they are underrepresented minorities — can be strategically beneficial for PIs, other than getting a cut of the $10k per student.
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S24 has gotten emails asking him to sign up for these types of programs/services. You can get “real” (ha) research experience to the tune of $5/10/15k or more. This type of thing is a hard “no” from this parent. I’m frankly discouraged by the fact that HS students are no longer allowed to be teens, doing typical teenager things, during their summers - when did getting a job and hanging out with your friends become passe? By touting the “research” done by their students, Penn is perpetuating the idea that successful applicants can never get off the treadmill - not even to enjoy some of their summer break.
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I agree. DS24 gets these emails, too. Even though we can afford to pay for them, he’s getting a skills-based summer job in our community. He needs to learn to drive and manage cash, too. If Penn isn’t interested in families like ours, that’s fine by me.
It’s a shame for them. I took an online course by invitation from U Penn when I was in high school, and it was a great class. I know it’s a great institution otherwise.
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I’m not knocking Penn, which is an outstanding school, and I’m sure they aren’t alone in sharing this kind of stat about their students. It’s just that by highlighting these kinds of activities it adds to the crazy out there - the student created non-profits, the student run businesses, the service trips to exotic locales etc. In a world where being a fantastic, well rounded student is no longer enough (for schools like Penn) there is now an entire cottage industry dedicated to making junior stand out (for a fee, of course).
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What subject was the online class please and did it help prepare you for college level work? Looks like Penn started online in 2012 so you must have had kids at an extremely young age to have been in HS in 2012 or later and have a DS24!
“In 2012, Penn launched its first Massive Open Online Courses and created an office dedicated to online learning.”
I agree with most of what everyone is saying here and I hate this trend. The pay-to-play racket is gross.
Spouse and I are both science professors. Even though our kids want to go into STEM, we wouldn’t dream of snowplowing the way for them to do high school research. That would be up to them entirely. Only if it was their idea, and only if they asked for help, I would give them some advice on how where they might look for opportunities and how to approach someone to ask about doing research. They’re on their own otherwise. They haven’t shown interest so far, so we’ve never even discussed it. They have regular dumb high schooler jobs.
I don’t want to downplay the accomplishments of some rare, unique high schoolers who manage to do meaningful research in high school. They definitely exist. I’ve met a few. But boy, are they a tiny minority.
I’m sure there are some official programs that place HS students in research labs and do a good job of it. Again, that’s the minority of HS research gigs.
True to the trope, when I was a 1st year PhD student my advisor took on a HS student in cooperation with the local HS and state science fair and pawned her off on me. I was wayyyy too busy to truly teach her anything, and I couldn’t trust her to physically do anything because I was working with delicate and tempermental cells. If my rare cell cultures died, it would set my project back months. I was really stuck. She mostly just watched me work. I tried for hours to teach her proper pipetting technique (an elementary skill) to put solutions into dishes. She even screwed that up, so I would end up throwing out what she did and re-doing it after she left. She was in the lab for maybe 10-20 hours total?
End of the term, she had a presentation for her HS class and science fair. She did a terrible job with the draft so I gave her some of my powerpoint slides since she left it til the last minute and risked failing the project. She copied my slides wholesale and won the state science fair and got a fat scholarship to a highly-regarded SLAC 
. I haven’t thought of her since then. I just looked at her professional bio and she listed that stint as laboratory technician for 1 year (!!) and that she was issued a grant (!!) and a federal apprenticeship (!!). None of that is true. The lying aside, that’s one example of what can happen in situations with the incentives that are in place. Maybe I should have let her fail, but it seemed mean at the time.
Again, it’s not every student, and there are notable exceptions. I’ve had some HS students that have been able to follow instructions and do some helpful work, but it’s mostly limited to grunt work. I’m not talking about YOUR child when I say that the vast majority of HS students don’t do research that would warrant authorship for a publication in a legit journal. It is more realistic in some fields/projects than others. But yeah, incorporating HS students into some science research labs can be tough.
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How awful. I hope she has not gone into anything medical, anything in science, frankly, any field which requires integrity!
The truth is that one can easily self-prep for the SAT/ACT, at essentially zero cost. No matter how much tutoring a family buys, if the kid hasn’t learned the material, they’re not going to do well on the test, and if they do well on the test, they have obviously learned the material (unless someone else has taken the test for them). In this respect, the SAT/ACT did winnow out those with inflated grades and bogus achievements, because a 4.0 GPA and other academic “awards” don’t jibe with a 1000 SAT score. But how in the world is a poor kid, or a kid who doesn’t have family scientist connections, or a kid whose family just doesn’t understand that the latest thing is to buy Biff and Skipper a research publication, supposed to compete with THIS?
SHAME on the colleges for not recognizing this scam for what it is. How in the world could Penn’s admissions committee have been so dense as to not realize what is going on when so many kids are suddenly claiming published research articles on their applications?
BTW, it is not too late to out that high schooler for her academic and professional dishonesty. Better now, before people are potentially harmed by her. An anonymous letter to her institution should do the job - after all, they can see that there was no grant, and no federal apprenticeship, by simply asking her for proof. And I bet it’s not the only thing falsified on her pro bio.
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Are there fields that don’t require integrity😀
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As I said above, I don’t support Penn highlighting research but just to be clear they said a third of the admits did research, they didn’t say how many published research. IME not many high schoolers are publishing research before college app deadlines.
As many posters know there is a difference between doing research, publishing a paper in a high school level journal, and publishing research in a more prestigious publication. The companies that work in the space noted in the OP article offer all three.
Not mentioned in the article is the fact that many colleges themselves, as well as profs, also offer programs for high schoolers to do similar research activities. And many cost $$$. Companies like Sotheby’s, to take one example, also offer these programs, again for $$$.
Ohhh, unfortunately she’s a clinician, but not an MD. I assume she wouldn’t have passed her professional licensing exams if she were unfit. But yeah, the dishonesty (as I perceive it) is pretty galling. I’ve noticed this with several people I’ve worked with. Their ideas of what they did are different than mine. I had one friend who dropped out of our PhD program but conveniently has it ambiguously listed on his his LinkedIn so that it seems like he has a PhD.
Does this former HS student actually think that because my PI had a federal grant to fund my work, that means it extends to her too? I mean, I would never claim my PI’s funding as my own, but maybe the high schooler doesn’t understand that. Maybe her rich and well-connected parents told her to list stuff with those made-up titles and it’s just persisted on her resume. But she’s a grown professional now. Now that I’ve seen her bio, I’ll think about mentioning it to someone, but it feels weird to gripe about something she lists from back in high school.
I see this kind of thing a lot, honestly. It’s disappointing but sadly not that rare. I found out one of my own colleagues had not only published exclusively in pay-to-play predatory journals, but had plagiarized the work as well. Fortunately he was working as an adjunct. He’d applied for a tenure-track position in our department and I discovered the fraud and alerted the search committee. He was not invited to teach any more courses for us even though we were in a real pinch. I hate the incentives in academics, all the way from K-12 and beyond, to inflate one’s accomplishments. I see it in scientific research and glam journal publishing all the time too. There is no real shortcut for due diligence and a finely tuned BS detector. Obviously AO’s don’t have the time they’d need to suss out such things, even if they have the expertise. So frustrating!
Oh, and I don’t want to devolve into discussing chatGPT (please!) but it’s only going to make the pay-to-publish model even worse than it already is. At least you used to be able to look at a bunch of the articles in such journals and see them as transparently full of 
based solely on the poor/nonsensical writing. Experts will still be able to tell, but it will be harder for the average Joe.
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Unfortunately, in today’s society, law, politics/elected office, and pretty much anything in corporate America seem to no longer require integrity or ethics.
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I have A LOT of opinions about this (parent of rising Senior). The pressure on HS kids to perform original “research” has become beyond ridiculous.
At our HS, there is a 3 year “Science Research” sequence that essentially all STEM type kids feel they MUST take to be competitive for college admissions. On its face, the program seems good. Over the 3 years, the kids are supposed to (1) come up with a research question; (2) find a mentor by essentially cold emailing professors; (3) perform mentored research; (4) present findings by senior year in the form of a paper/poster; (5) enter competitions.
The reality is far different. The students are divided into 2 groups: those with connected parents and those without. Students with parent connections (usually not determined by wealth but by whether the parents themselves are in a science or science-adjacent field) end up with papers that sound like they came out of graduate program and rarely answer a question the student themself has come up with. The kids who do everything on their own (no connections) end up with projects with titles like “The effect of social media on sleep patterns” and their original “research” consists of surveys they send to random community members. Every week I receive an email asking me to answer survey questions for a student’s research project. These are not the kids who win the science competitions.
It’s all such a joke. The simple, survey-type research is actually within the bailiwick of a HS student! The award-winning research is all significantly, and I mean significantly, mentored.
I see the impulse of parents wanting to use these companies because I have seen the stress of many parents running down all their connections, trying to get someone to take on their student as a researcher. And why???
Fifteen year olds, no matter how precocious, do not perform ground-breaking research! There are almost no exceptions to this. Why has “research” become this additional hoop to jump through? It’s so dumb and toxic.
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Peer pressure. I know one (Bay Area) parent that resisted this idea for a long time and thought it was ridiculous. But with his kid surrounded by an “Ivy or bust” mentality in school, and parents purchasing all kinds of private counseling packages he finally caved in. He figured it was unfair to not provide these opportunities to his kid when everyone around her was racing ahead. He wasn’t (and still isn’t) happy about doing this but felt he had no choice. (Yes I know that’s arguable, but I’m just relaying his view).
Because a) private college counselors are constantly coming up with new ways to distinguish their clients from the rest of the application pool and b) the tippy top schools themselves encourage these activities either directly via their public statements or indirectly by seemingly accepting certain types of students at higher rates.
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re: “dumb” survey questions- my Gyn was participating in a research study (which was heavily funded by a pharma company) and as he was explaining the purpose of the study, it was non-invasive, you couldn’t be identified because the data was aggregated, etc. he said “seems like a lot of money to me to answer something which is sort of intuitive”.
So I got curious. One of the early survey questions was along the lines of "if your doctor needs to discuss your weight, do you prefer: “heavy”, “overweight”, “obese”, “fat”, "none of the above.
I howled with laughter. I think it was for one of the weight loss drugs, and they were trying to come up with a physician communication campaign. Lots of money spent to learn that the answer- for middle aged women- is always going to be “none of the above”.
Lots of money IRL goes to survey research!!!
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