Man, I wish that's how it worked. I often complain that universities treat PhD students like me as students-like-the-undergrads when it's convenient, and instructors-like-adjuncts when THAT is more convenient to the management structure. Cynically, I think that's the biggest advantage to the university system of treating students as, well, STUDENTS rather than apprentices or employees who provide valuable work in our own right: if you frame the benefit we get from our research as training, you don't really have to pay us for it.

(Here via brainwane, and then I recognized you from MeFi...)