MIT is one step ahead of you, they already ding faculty with NSF GRF students extra overhead because ostensibly the NSF fellow is there for MIT's brand and not the professor's research.
Yeah, places like MIT are where I got the model. Seeing how my peers were treating at places that are not like MIT is how I got the motivation to care.
Tippy-top programs in any particular field already operate in a way that treats grad students more like students than itinerant labor.
It's the other 99% of institutions that are gutting scientific human capital in the name of empowering incompetent middle management. (Professors are middle management. Most of them are incompetent at that job.)
