Hopefully this will happen if schools identify the arbitrage opportunity. I think a deep problem with the pre-doc model is that it creates uniformity among PhD students. If you're a professor hiring a pre-doc, you're not looking for variance. You're looking for someone who can execute some relatively standard set of instructions and because you have limited budget you will go for safer options. You'll take the candidate who has already taken econ classes and knows Stata instead of the guy who studied biology. I think we're going to an equilibrium in which hundreds of people will just keep doing marginal stuff with the same universal recipe. It also encourages the existing pool of professors to do this kind of work since it can be massively parallelized with predocs. I don't like it