Wow. This just makes me sick. Here are my thoughts about this, but first, lets look over what USFIRST means:
USF.I.R.S.T: United States Foundation for Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology

Foundation-
FIRST is a foundation. A foundation is described as "non-governmental entity that is established as a nonprofit corporation or a charitable trust, with a principal purpose of making grants to unrelated organizations, institutions, or individuals for scientific, educational, cultural, religious, or other charitable purposes". FIRST fits that description perfectly.

Inspiration-
FIRST's goal is to inspire students to take on STEM careers and majors. FIRST does this through the medium of robots. As Dean Kamen says, "It's not about the robot". And he's right. Robots just happen to be a popular form of medium that attracts students into the program and inspires them to be engineers.

Recognition-
Another one of FIRST's goals is to recognize STEM, and those who excel at it. FIRST does this in two main ways (there are more than two): Through teaching and celebrating the advances of scientists and engineers, and by giving awards to teams who show great contributions to furthering science and technology. "We get what we celebrate" (Woodie Flowers), and FIRST knows how to through the right kind of celebration.

Science-
Science is one of the many important fields in FIRST. Science is also one of the vital skills needed to become a successful engineer (funny how that works, huh?). Science ranges from Biology, to Chemistry, to Physics, and everything in between. All sciences are used by successful engineers, but unfortunately like the lack of engineers in this world, there are a lack of students who enjoy the sciences. Science needs to be spread, and some teams are doing it in a great way. I learned how the human arm works last year by watching Wildstang's 200(7?) robot, and its human-like arm. It clearly shows when teams use science to their advantage.

Technology-
Technology is the driving force of the world. As humans, we as a species are constantly evolving. Adapting, changing our world to better suit us. To a point, technology is evolving faster than we are, and if we don't learn about it, this constant evolution that is bettering our world may stop. FIRST inspires students to create new technology, and use the technology available to us today. IDEs, CAD, power tools, water jetting. All these great tools are available, and many of us didn't know what they were before FIRST.


Now that we've looked over what FIRST is, and what it's goals are, let's see what matters:

-FIRST is an organization to help students: check
-FIRST inspires students to pursue STEM careers: check
-FIRST recognizes mathematics and the sciences: check


The biggest one is Inspiration. The goal of FIRST is to inspire (and recognize) math and science. How that is done is up to the team. While I don't agree with it, a team could have all the mentors build, design, and fabricate the robot, and if the students still get inspired, then mission accomplished. How the inspiration and recognition are done doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. I'm not going into morals here, what's "right" and what's "wrong", or even what's unfair. The cold, hard truth is that the only requirement for a successful FIRST team is for the students to be inspired. If you had a completely student-run team, but the students weren't inspired about math and science, then the team, as a whole, fails.


So next time you see a really good robot, instead of thinking "the mentors must have built that", think "Those students must be really inspired, and get tons of recognition from their fellow peers".


Just my $00.02 on this.