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Comment by entee | Hacker News Reader

Having seen the system work as a grad student, this would absolutely gut higher education research in the US. No chance would I have attended grad school if I were being taxed on tuition as income. Wired has another thorough write up here:

https://www.wired.com/story/grad-students-are-freaking-out-a...

Likely far fewer people would pursue a PhD, harming every part of the innovation food chain. There are major problems with the higher-ed and grad school system to be sure, but massively increasing taxes on grad students is not a solution. Much better would be to find a way to make non-professor academic positions and other science positions more stable, among other options.

This proposal taxes the front lines of science to finance a corporate tax cut, it's just shameful.

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> this would absolutely gut higher education research in the US

It will also gut undergraduate education.

All of our science labs are taught by graduate students. As it is, we have more classes than PhD students to teach them. For a few semesters, we've been forced to ask one of our undergraduates to lead a lab. If the bill passes, the university will likely cut classes offered.

This will not only disrupt a semester, but entire degrees. Introductory Chemistry, for example, is a requirement for other upper-level classes. If students can't get into a section, they will have a chain reaction of delayed classes and increased time to graduation. I suspect it will increase the dropout rate of undergraduates as well, beyond the PhDs who decide to drop out with a master's.

Further, the publishing of science will be hurt. Work is mostly done by grad students and postdocs. Not all labs have enough funding for a postdoc, but all of them in our department (chem) have grad students. Without workers, the work can't be done.

Likely, we'll have to rely on more affluent international students to come and suffer through the PhD process. Hopefully they'll stay, but they may leverage their degree into a strong position back home where their family and friends are, and where people speak their language.

American students who have the money to do a PhD probably won't. It's incredibly hard and abstractly rewarding, and academia is not a path to much wealth or power.

Poor kids with a work ethic won't be able to work their ass off through undergrad and get to a PhD program where they only need to worry about work.

The tradeoff of saving for retirement and accruing career momentum will be replaced with students doubling their loan burden to get through the 4 years of undergrad and the 5 years of grad school. Good thing they removed the ability to deduct interest payments.

The American Dream is deep in my heart, and they made the edges razor sharp.

There is no shortage of PhDs. Encouraging people to skip the Phd and enter the private sector would be better for the innovation food chain.

I think that reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of what the private sector does and what PhD programs do.

PhD programs train scientists. I have often compared going to grad school in the sciences to years of getting punched in the face by nature telling you, "sorry try again!" Your mentor (in the best of circumstances) teaches you how to navigate that and sharpens your mind. In the process you learn how to ask the right questions. Doesn't sound like much, but the right question and how to ask it is the core of discovery and so the core of innovation.

You can certainly learn those things in industry, but you'll be working at a different place in the innovation cycle. Almost always you'll be working quite a bit further along than the initial discovery. There will be many challenges, but core, fundamental discoveries remain disproportionately generated by blue sky/harebrained schemes hatched in academia.

This is because the number of failures tolerated in academia is vastly larger than in industry. If you spend 7 years repeatedly failing at everything until one thing works, we just call that a PhD. If you do that in industry, we call that 7 jobs in 7 years (a little reductive, but you get my point). If you injure that part of the innovation ecosystem, there will be fewer wild ideas to build companies off of, and we will all be poorer for it.

You also miss the knock on effect of making it so that only the better-off can afford grad school. Already grad school suffers from that bias, and this would only make it worse. We want the best minds regardless of wealth to get as highly trained as possible to discover nature's secrets.

There is a shortage of grad students in many departments.

Cutting PhD students would require cutting the number of undergrad students educated and classes offered to them. This would prevent science and engineering students from getting their bachelor's on time because of requirements for science sequences. An undergrad 4-year degree becomes 5 years long or aren't completed at all.

The need to expand class offerings to teach undergrads requires TAs to teach labs. Our department is already over-offering classes compared to the number of grad student TAs.

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