[ml_thoughts]

The problem of experienced professionals vs grad students seems to be a real problem for science. Academia could really do with a build-out of experienced research scientists able to make careers out of consistently building experience and knowledge.

Instead most labs are oriented around a PI that has little time to look into details of most projects due to grant-writing pressures, post-docs who are not expected to stay long-term in lab but whose modal career advancement expectation is the incredibly difficult "land a tenure-track position" option, and graduate students who leave as soon as they've accrued enough scientific knowledge to be truly useful.

It's purely a cost-structure decision on a per-lab basis, but on a societal level it's costly to have most science being spearheaded by inexperienced graduate students (messing up experiments in ways more experienced researchers would not) and costly to train so many people in niche science fields that they then leave to join unrelated tech companies. Salary may play a part in this decision, but many scientists are passionate about their field of study and seems like the real deal-breaker is a lack of career options post "researcher-in-training" phase.

[BlueTemplar]

There are plenty of grad students that do their internships in companies rather than academia. (YMMV depending on the field of course...)