So I have spent around the past 7 months applying to jobs going from a research tech that turned into a lab manager position trying to move to fulltime lab manager in the North East. I applied to at least a hundred jobs and did around 20 interviews and got maybe 15 offers. This was one of my top choices as I loved the lab and the PI (primary investigator aka PhD in charge of the lab). If you don't know how payment works in academia research, it is funded by grants including salary. I am not even completely sure on the specifics but the universities assign “tiers” to roles (research tech, lab manager, post doc research associate, staff scientist, PI) and they each get paid a certain salary. This salary is established on some level by the provider of the grants (NIH/DOD/etc) and negotiated via individual institutions.
Now, you might see that number for tuition and think “wow, that is absurd” and it is but it isn't even close to what grant money pulls in. Institutions in Boston get something like 90% of money from grants. Grants range widely but I would say lower to middle range of each grant per year for researchers at a place like BU is likely 1-2 million dollars. This is per grant, not per lab. There are around 1600 labs at BU and most labs are funded by multiple grants.
All in all, BU is essentially a corporation with annual revenue of 2 billion per year.
Now I am calling out BU specifically because of my interaction with them and I will say that the PI I worked with tried their absolute hardest to get me what I stated as “fair” (70k) even though I said my minimum was 60k (this was only because it would have been an amazing work environment). PIs have almost no say in how salaries are determined despite being the ones that bring in these millions. Salary in academic research is an absolute joke and I won't even go into the near slave labor that PhD students do which is 14-16 hour days working on their projects on some level, the very projects that bring in millions for the schools for around 30k a year.
The reason for this post is how unacceptable it is for this kind of pay in a place like Boston. It has some of the highest cost of living in the country yet these institutions, which heavily prop up the Boston economy, offer pathetic salaries. The most egregious part of the entire thing is I met a student who graduated with a degree in software engineering or computer science (I forget but he did programming for the lab) who was titled as research tech and I would have been amazed if he got paid 40k a year. Having someone that can actually write their own scripts or even fully customize others in an academic lab is literally life changing for your research and warrants at least 80k in Boston.
I have instead accepted an offer where I will be making 73k a year in a beautiful New England town where that will make me very comfortable but I just wanted to call out a specific university for their pathetic wages.