Here’s one, founded by Dr Robert Malkin (a Duke prof) who does mentoring, but there are more mentors listed under the mentor tab. https://iri-nc.org/
Brochure: https://iri-nc.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Fall-Brochure-2022.pdf
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Thanks for your detailed explanation of the ethical issues involved.
I also agree with you that the linked article does a great job describing high school research.
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Ahh, this is interesting. I took a look at the brochure and the affiliated faculty.
Malkin is emeritus, so no longer has a lab at Duke. I think at least a couple of the other profs are also retired. The thing that really stuck out to me is that only a couple of them list their main employer. They all list where they earned their PhD, but their employers are mostly totally different universities.
I think they’re getting around any legal problems a few ways:
- The main employer isn’t listed; the “day job”, if you will. These include Dickinson, LaSalle, Worcester State, etc. None of those are mentioned in the brochure.
- They are calling this the International Research Institute of North Carolina – so they can be employed as “adjunct” faculty through this place.
- All of these programs are virtual. So whether or not computational or other resources from the “day jobs” are actually used, it would be easy to say they weren’t.
- They must have their own IRB.
I seems that IRI-NC has established itself as its own institution, and hired these faculty as adjuncts. I wouldn’t do it and I would side-eye a colleague for doing it. Perhaps they do a better job than what I think they’re doing, but the guaranteed publication for the price of $10K makes me think not. I bet most of their colleagues don’t even know they’re doing it.
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If the person writing that email is the academic director at a private school, they should be embarrassed. That email is rife with grammatical errors.
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That’s why I suspect a phishing scam. However, I get pay-to-publish emails with such grammar all the time. You can pay and get your “product”, for sure, so they’re not entirely a scam. They’re just total BS and not respected journals. That email is possibly a real request for services, sent from overseas, with international students as clients. I hope someone responds, just to see if it’s a real offer.
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Thanks for sharing. My takeaway is that even the brightest high school students are making negligible contributions to research because they just don’t have the necessary background. To whit, it sounds more impressive than it actually is.
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Yes that’s exactly it. Though it happens, it is exceedingly rare for a high schooler to make a major research contribution. It is seen most often in disciplines that don’t require physical resources, or in non-experimental building/fabrication type of stuff.
I’ve been told by friends who would like to mentor high-schoolers that it can be quite difficult to arrange unless the student researcher is participating on an official program for secondary school students because of laws in some locations about the safety and liability issues. So if the state or municipality requires official waivers or fingerprinting and criminal background checks for any adults doing educational work with minors, it can be a heavy of a lift for the individual researchers to do all of that paperwork without the administrative support of an official program run by their university. It is easier if the university already has a program in place to allow minors to work on campus.
That issue surprised me since I presume universities don’t have to do background checks on their employees though it is certainly possible to have a 17yo freshman if they are coming out of a school system that has kids with fall birthdays start kindergarten before their fifth birthday. Maybe there is an exception in those places for minors enrolled in college.
I indirectly got to know the profiles of dozens of kids who won the major science prizes one year. The contributions these students made, with the help of mentoring, were legit. A Caltech educated professor who ran across one of the published papers on Arxiv prior to publication thought it was written by a grad student. But as with most grad student papers, the real contributions to the field were small, and this is at the pinnacle of high school research.
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I don’t doubt there are some kids who make noteworthy contributions to research; however, given the ubiquity of HS research it is a definite minority. In my view, high school students shouldn’t have to participate in research to prove their academic chops in the first place. It’s part of a trend I dislike which rewards high school students for acting like mini adults instead of enjoying their teen years. Adulthood makes up the majority of your life - why the rush to get there faster.
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That’s a valid view, but then it comes back to how do the most selective colleges actually choose students given that so many have a 4.0 GPA and near-perfect test scores (for the colleges that consider them)?
Currently in holistic admissions a decent amount of weight is given to extracurriculars, and research is certainly a valid extracurricular for those actually interested in it.
Of course, it is valid - although with the number of students citing “research” these days it isn’t as noteworthy as it was a few years ago (like starting a charity, foreign mission trips etc). If it is a true interest, great, but let’s be honest - if you’ve got people shilling access for $10k, passion for research isn’t likely to be the motivating factor.
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Research is a valid extracurricular. But so is scooping ice cream to help contribute to the family’s monthly electric bill, and so is working as a lifeguard at the town pool, and so is organizing and running a swabbing event for a the lunchroom worker at the HS who needs a bone marrow transplant.
The hoopla around research- whether dubious, legitimate, superficial or meaningful- has distracted from all these other valid EC’s. And that’s a shame.
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Why do you say that?
Some students don’t live near a research university, some do and can’t get traction with a local prof, and international HS students have no chance of doing research at a local uni. I expect some students in each of those buckets are passionate about research, or at least very interested in doing a deep dive into a topic of interest.
Is it great that these opportunities cost $? Nope, but life isn’t fair and we aren’t going to solve inequity in college admissions on this thread.
A number of these orgs do have scholarship dollars and/or a sliding fee structure based on income, which can bring opportunity to some lower income students, but of course it’s not enough.
I think I remember us talking about your kid(s)’ high school research in the past? If I recall correctly, one or more of your kids was pretty extraordinary in their high school and/or undergrad research in something like math? Again, it happens more often in subjects like math than others.
Your kid’s experience is quite rare. Our high school typically sends a couple kids to HYPSM each year. There are a quite a few professor kids at our high school. Many of the prof kids are tippy top students (shocker), and quite a few have STEM prof parents. I don’t know a single kid from our high school who has worked in university research at all, let alone at the level to make a significant contribution or get their name on a publication. It’s quite unusual to do it at that level and your kid(s) are extraordinary in that respect. Perhaps it’s more common in some high schools/communities/universities, but it just doesn’t happen much anywhere I’ve ever been.
I just can’t even handle a reality where high school kids have to do freaking university research to be competitive for selective schools. Most labs can’t even give sufficient opportunities to undergrads.
This year, my spouse was nice enough to help a HS senior out with an environmental chemistry project for his IB class. He’s NMSF, a total superstar, one of our kid’s best friends, and we’re close with his parents. My spouse handed the project to him on a silver platter and did intensive hand-holding. Guess what? He was terrible at it! Almost every aspect of it! Totally expected for someone with his age and experience.
Any developing expectations for HS kids to get research experience, and for college profs to provide that experience just seems exhausting for everyone and a big mismatch for all but the most exceptional and interested high schoolers.
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Part of the issue (among many) is that many colleges are specifically seeking “Intellectual Vitality” and even rate applicants on a scale of 1-6 for intellectual curiosity. So research really checks that “box” in a way that other pursuits don’t.
Savvy counselors/school/students are on to this.
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Published research is not the only “high impact” EC. Others include winning major art or writing contests, math or physics competitions, certain well-known summer programs, and of course being a recruited athlete. It’s not that these are the only way to get into the most selective colleges (plenty of students do get admitted to the most elite colleges without any of the above), but these are high probability paths.
Everything I listed above gets much more credit than working as a lifeguard, because they are considered harder to accomplish than working as a lifeguard. Or at least research was considered harder before the prevalence of “pay-to-play”.
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Yeah, I agree with @ColdWombat, taking pay for offering research opportunities to the public (aside from things like summer camps in which it’s an addendum to your contract, of course) doesn’t seem right. And if it’s the sort of thing where you’re taking pay from a parent to provide research opportunities for their kid specifically, that almost feels like a bribe or something, you know?
Now, I have—like a good number of people in my subfield—presented research work at academic conferences that I’ve co-authored with my own kids, but those have been one-off projects where they came up with the initial idea (I think that’s a key element right there) and I helped guide them to make sure it was done to an appropriate level of rigor. But I’m in a field where there is room at conferences for exploratory projects and my subfield doesn’t require lots of capital equipment or such, so it’s simpler than if it was, say, particle physics.
(And one of those led directly to an idea for a special topics course I’m teaching next year, so it’s not like I get nothing from it myself.)
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Many people here are probably familiar with Jeffrey Selingo because of his recent book on college admissions, along with his prior work. I was interested in what he had to say, and came across a recent interview with Polygence.
To me the company appears to be dedicated to selling research projects to HS students. The mentors appear to mainly be PhD students, and I didn’t see any specific guarantee of publication. But it was interesting to see this is becoming so main stream.
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Polygence is the firm I alluded to in my prior posts elsewhere about paid research. They pitched me very heavily about lining up a research project for S22. The whole thing seemed sketchy even if the projects they showed us as part of the pitch seemed interesting. Iirc, the project cost was around 4k.
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