With this tax increase, I'll lose a paycheck and a half.
I live in the Southeast, so my cost of living is pretty low- but salaries are mostly the same no matter what. I won't be destitute with this cut, but I will have very little wiggle room. I don't know what students in more expensive cities will do.
My partner and I are the pride of our families for getting PhDs. We both come from poor families, so we don't have anybody to turn to for help aside from one another. She sends home a few hundred bucks a month to support her parents, and I feed her so she can afford to.
Grad school is hard for a whole lot of reasons. It's hard to get American students interested in doing it. For a party that claims America First, they're doing a lot of things to ensure that our citizens have very few incentives to choose it as a career. It takes half a decade to get a degree. You get no raises, almost no vacation, constant work, few free weekends, ambiguous goals, and (for academics) a post-grad career path that seems like 2-4 years of the same thing.
I don't know if I have a point. I'm just 5 years in and kind of tired of departmental politics (and now with national politics). I love my work and have pretty good prospects, but I know I got lucky with the group I joined. I'd advise most students to make grad school their 2nd or 3rd option, if med/osteopath schools don't take them or they can't find an entry-level industry opening. Even a master's in something middling might be useful and much shorter.