The destruction of graduate education in the United States
scottaaronson.com
scottaaronson.com
An article recently posted here on HN gives a more nuanced explanation for what's going on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15807842
TL;DR, the tuition fee deferral scheme that universities currently use is a grant-money laundering scheme. It's used to take federal grant money that comes with strings attached (e.g. can only be spent on certain things like paying salaries for grad students, or research costs) and launder it into money that can be spent on whatever the university wants (e.g. building new campuses or paying for nice desks for administrators). It's probably not unreasonable for the federal government to try to close this loophole.
The issue is that students are caught in the crossfire here, and I'm not sure that the incentives are there for universities to protect them fully.
But to be clear, the universities could just stop billing the government false grad student salaries, and then grad students' take home pay and tax exposure would remain unchanged, and there would be no crisis. The problem is that then universities would have to find a new money laundering scheme, or would have to make structural changes to their budgets that they would prefer not to make.
I guess it's because these same administrators ultimately control the narratives (and budgets, jobs, etc) coming from the schools, creating a self-protecting cycle which only generates more administrative power.
So when attempts to curtail their power happen they can twist it to make it seem like it's an attack on teachers, students, and research - instead of the separate group of people who consume the greatest amount of resources within the school, who don't generate the positive research and economic utility for which universities are typically known.
Which is a shame, because there are probably no better people to stand up for this than the professors and researchers. Plenty of research has shown these people and their work aren't responsible for the massive increase in tuition and costs associated with schools. Yet the problem is perpetually the amount of revenue and income the school can make, not how it's being used.
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32821678
Think twice about beginning a bachelor, masters, or doctoral degree in this country, as you will be crushed with debt.
With a lot of work, I was able to graduate in '94 with an E.E. degree with a total student loan debt of $1,500. That is not possible here anymore, but it is possible in Europe.
If I had to do it again, I would be gone.
Even for the job scenario, you get a tax credit for foreign taxes paid which in most industialized countries would probably neutralize any US tax burden and then some. If the job is in a developing country, I would think the cost of living advantages would make it worth it if you were above the limit.
However, not a CPA or finance pro. I went to grad school abroad and looked into the implications of staying a bit.
This is just patently false.
The criticism of admin bloat by faculty and students precedes the right-wing press criticism by decades, is far more harsh, and is still going strong.
The whole damn criticism, as it exists in the popular press today, can be traced quite directly back to academia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Ginsberg_(political_s...
Or a more recent example, https://home.isi.org/sites/default/files/MA59.3_Seery_Sympos...
And from the student perspective, the recent votes at places like Chicago to unionize (and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes)
Far from complicit, faculty and students are leading the charge, and have been since the 1980s.
BTW, if you wanted to curtail administrative bloat/power in universities, there are ways to use the tax code and science funding policy to do so. and lots of serious policy proposals by the people listed above would very likely have great effect.
This policy targets students instead.
Can you give a summary of your proposals here? Skimmed the Seery article and it doesn't seem to have anything directly related to the tax code, but could be missing it.
I'm at a school that underwent a grad student unionisation drive, and pretty much everything that the union proposed would have amounted to further empowering the administration at the expense of the academics (e.g. introducing new mediator officials with extensive compulsive power over advisors if their students should feel wronged in one way or another, hiring more staff to enforce diversity-friendly admissions and hiring outcomes, ...). At least the politicised end of the student body seems to consider the administration, rather than the academics, to be their natural ally.
> and, more importantly, the justification provided by the student groups that organized those votes
According to the White House, everything in the executive branch is going wonderfully.
FTA: Note that the Trump administration has already ("already" links to: https://www.statnews.com/2017/05/22/trump-budget-research-gr...) made tightening overhead rules—i.e., doing the exact opposite of what would be needed to counteract the new tax—a central focus of its attempt to cut federal research funding.
The point is that this is the system and it has been for decades, and everybody involved knew it and knows it. And the tax changes are a deliberate attack on the system i.e universities.
If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed, well, you're free to believe that, but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.
This system is also why I didn't get much from my grants because the university took out the "tuition". So just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.
> but this is not some kind of swindle universities have been getting away with, it's the system working as it was designed to work.
Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed". This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.
I don't know the particulars of your situation so I can't comment specifically. But the grants in questions are primarily from the federal government and they are sized with the understanding that universities will deduct this "tuition" from them. If you're talking about a typical NSF, NIH, or DOD grant made to a typical research university, then the "tuition" portion of that money was intended to go to the university all along.
just because everyone knows it and has been around is not a good enough reason to keep it around. With that approach nothing would ever change.
Scott's counterpoint to this view is that destroying something that has problems doesn't mean something better will pop into existence. Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air, and it's hard to believe these changes are intended to help rather than to hurt.
Paying students $10-$30k a year doing cutting edge research is not what I call "working as designed"
That argument supports "the system is bad" but that doesn't mean it wasn't designed to work that way. I don't know how much the cost of research would increase if grad students were paid more. If it were practical to raise their stipends I would be for it. But the changes discussed in the post will not help grad students, even if the universities stop charging the fictitious tuition.
This is often coming from institution with billions of dollar in endowments.
Addressed in the post: "except for the richest few universities, they’d have to scale back research and teaching pretty drastically" yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.
They know and add extra expecting it is going to go to the tuition and the lab and grad student won't even see parts of it. The university can also then "know" that graduate students have to pay taxes now so they should accordingly pay a more competitive salary for research.
> Destroying the way scientific research is funded in the US will not make a better system appear out of thin air
I don't think research is going to stop. Universities will have to find a way to be more competitive, spend more money on stipends, limit the number of PhDs they accept. Some might have to reduce administrative costs, dip into their endowment to provide fellowships or tuition endowments.
> yes, some universities could afford to continue doing research. Most couldn't, because research in basic science is expensive.
I can see that point and it is unfortunate, but it is also unfortunate that this expensive research had to be hidden behind a tuition "charade" (universities skimming a good part off of grants) and a tax loophole. Some of the tuition taken from the grants were not even going to the labs, they ended up supporting the administrative bloat.
Without having any insight into the reasons for this specific legislation, I am speculating that it might target two things: 1) Rising tuition and administrative bloat. Maybe it is trying to force universities to become more fiscally conservative. 2) Reduce overall the number of PhDs. I maybe misremembering but I've been hearing how we pump out too may PhD candidates compared to the available positions for them. Maybe PhD positions have to become more competitive and accept only a fraction of the students they accept today. I remember my classmates wanted to do a PhD just because the market was slow after a crash so it was a way to postpone graduating for a few years. That just didn't seem quite right. Also on an interesting side-note, the same universities that admit a larger number of graduate students, then turn around and limit tenure track positions. At some point, after a few decades of that, something has to give, it's not sustainable.
I don't think that sentence at the end of his article is particularly clear; it doesn't give the question much attention. I'm not even sure the linked article supports the point that Aaronson is trying to make with it; my mental model of this could be wrong but it seems to me that the NIH overhead tightening is saying that more money must be spent on direct research (researcher salaries, reagent costs, etc) and less on overhead like facility operating costs, administrators, etc. So after the tightening there should be more money for direct research costs and less for overheads.
But the student tuition fee laundering scheme that we're discussing is not about the split between overhead vs. direct research costs as far as I can tell; it's about taking the direct research spending pot and laundering it so that it can be spent on anything, such as a new campus, which wouldn't be covered by the NIH grant at all.
If the laundering scheme goes away, then the university can't spend the direct research or overhead earmarked funds on a new campus, and so the campus just won't happen. And if the direct research portion of funding grows, then there's actually more money that can be spent on students, not less.
If that's right, then there's definitely a question about whether universities can adapt to be more efficient and lower overhead, and if they can't then research could well be disrupted, which would not be good -- but that's a very differnt concern than "the destruction of graduate education in the USA".
> If you think the system should be attacked and US research Universities defunded and destroyed
I'm not sure where you got that impression. I think that it's worth trying to improve the system so that grad students are treated more equitably (and that will have to be at the cost of the administrative class). I'm not sure that this tax change will have a net positive effect on students' wellbeing, as I already mentioned, and I think that's a bad thing.
But most importantly, I don't think we should give universities or anyone else a free pass to make this a "Trump VS Students" story, when it's more complicated than that.
Or tax the universites, not the students.
Do you have any links for further reading on this point? I'm not familiar with this argument, but could well believe it.
Other way around. It's not that tuition grants are being treated specially if they're taxed. All grants and material benefits of this nature are considered taxable by the IRS. Graduate tuition happens to have been given a special exemption from being taxable, and this bill is aimed at eliminating that special exemption, treating it like all other grants and material employment benefits.
> Or tax the universites, not the students.
There are two problems with this. First, the incidence of the tax (who actually ends up paying) is completely unrelated to who the IRS collects the tax from. This is why, even though employers are required to pay half of taxes for Social Security and Medicare, employees are the ones who bear the tax burden: 95% of any increases in FICA taxes are paid for by employees (via adjustments to wages and salaries), and vice versa.
What evidence indicates it's 95% and not 20% or 80% or 99%?
I'm not sure I understand your question. If you're asking the method by which this is done, it's a pretty straightforward econometric analysis problem - any graduate student probably does something similar in their first year.
If you're asking what the exact percentage is, I don't know. I remember it's in the range of 90% or 95%, but not the exact number. (It also varies slightly with economic cycles anyway, because the main determinant is the relative elasticities of supply and demand for labor).
I'm asking for a citation.
It seems to me there are many ways around this. The republicans have always had an anti-university narrative. I wouldn't blame people for assuming that this tax bill is indeed just another part of that.
If I were the federal budget czar, I would literally pump tens to hundreds of billions of dollars into opening national labs and hiring these STEM postgrads to do basic research. Figuring out how to efficiently produce something like high-temperature superconductors, carbon nanotubes, fusion power, carbon sequestration, gene therapy, etc. would solve some very fundamental problems, likely produce a huge return on investment, and gainfully employ thousands of highly educated people who are woefully underutilized. Even less outwardly ambitious research can produce value: look at what happened when the federal government wanted to build a more resilient computer network for DARPA.
But I’m not that czar, and I think subsidizing people into career dead ends is something we could stand to do less of.
Most of those jobs can be performed as well, if not better, by people with an undergrad degree, possibly with a master's tacked on + equiv number of years on the job for experience as opposed to the Ph.D.
I share the author's bewilderment in the face of the realization that this is, in fact, terrible for universities, and (seemingly, given what we know) not just weird news spin-doctoring or scare mongering:
"Given the existential risk to American higher education, why didn’t I blog about this earlier? ... It’s simply that I didn’t believe it—even given all the other stuff that could “never happen in the US,” until it happened this past year... Surely even the House Republicans would realize they’d screwed up this time, and would take out this crazy provision before the full bill was voted on? Or surely there’s some workaround that makes the whole thing less awful than it sounds? There has to be … right?"
I'm also confused. I decided that I didn't have the right kind of information to understand what was happening in the Federal government a long time ago, and I still think that, but I find this whole situation very puzzling, because it doesn't make much sense given how I think the world works (which is, of course, a deeply flawed and nearly useless model of the real world).
When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension.
The removal of state income tax deductions; the cutting of mortgage interest deductions; and the removal of the graduate school tax break all point the same direction.
As for Scott's suggestion that maybe universities can not charge, I can't possibly see that flying with the IRS. If the students still get that valuable education, taking something that used to cost $30k or more, declaring it "free" while still delivering the thing, and telling the irs that therefore, tada! no taxes are due! is... very unlikely to work.
What we have is the removal of a specific tax break aimed at graduate school education in order to punish the educated.
Sadly we can't have even marginally political posts on HN anymore because of this. US politics is currently too cancerous and toxic (as tends to happen cyclically) to have rational, well thought-out back-and-forths on topics without it descending into generalizations and attacking caricatures of "the other team".
Right now, people in states with high tax rates, people with mortgages, and graduate students pay lower federal tax rates than other people who don't share those favored statuses. One could more credibly argue that the current system punishes people who don't receive these tax breaks.
(Graduate students are favored if you count free tuition as compensation in the same way benefits like cars or apartments given to employees by other employers count as taxable compensation.)
Let’s remember that grad students are now being taxed for money they never receive. It’s not like money is changing hands for tuition. If they were a business and the university paid them $100k they would be able to expense the tuition.
1: Excluding some limited credits and deductions of at most a few thousand dollars each. Will graduate assistants be eligible for these?
There's no reason universities should receive special treatment here. They should pay their employees enough to live on, after taxes, like all other employers, and the fringe benefit of free tuition should be taxed like other fringe benefits.
Grad students receive a salary for their work and a discount from the sticker price of the tuition. They are separate transactions.
Of course not.
This is a tax cheat by universities: it allows them to use money that has been given to them on the condition they use it for students for other purposes by "paying" it to students then demanding it back immediately as tuition (in practice not even giving it to them: it never gets to the students bank account).
I agree, and I would add that these tax deductions were also targeted when they were implemented. Both parties favor their constituents in a way that probably isn't healthy for the unity of the nation.
It’s just like deductions for foreign tax payments. If you pay tax in Hong Kong because you live there you can deduct those tax payments on your federal tax now. Why are state taxes different?
How about red states start taxing their citizens to pay for their services rather than get subsidized by federal tax payers.
The fairest system is to charge everyone the same federal tax rates.
The usual objection is that blue states subsidize red states. Two problems with that. First, it isn't an accurate description of reality - some blue states are net recipients of federal funds, some red states are net payers. Second, most of those funds go to Democratic programs (entitlements) - so even if it were true, Democrats chose to do that.
Bull. Nice repetition of talking-points, but bull. Double-taxing people for living in certain states is certainly a punishment, and in fact one designed to enforce Republican fiscal policies on states that vote Democratic.
As to grad-student "tuition", this is like taxing food-delivery personnel on the company van. There is no grad-student "tuition" apart from grad-student labor.
That's true, and when non-progressives are regularly called Nazis, threatened, and assaulted on campuses I can't blame the right too much for wanting to stick it to them.
When climate denial and the rejection of basic science is one of the pillars of the party then this is a logical extension.
Basic science like the relative safety of nuclear power and GMOs? The left is just as happy as the right to ignore the scientific consensus when it conflicts with their ideology. Specifically on climate change, if the left had been willing to focus on actually solving the problem we probably could have had a revenue-neutral carbon tax by now. Instead they've used it as a vehicle to attack businesses and demand more government control of the economy, and the inevitable result is that it makes the right interpret the question "does human activity cause climate change?" as "are you a socialist hippie?"
Blaming Democrats for Republican attitudes toward climate change is rich. The recent trend to blame the left for all the bad things done on the right is just hilarious, given how much Republicans talk about “personal responsibility.”
No, Democrats aren’t to blame for Republican denial of climate change or support for Donald Trump or anything else like that. Republicans are responsible for the stuff they do.
What the hell? Having a revenue-neutral carbon tax (or cap-and-trade) has been the environmentalist left’s primary goal this whole time. But the economic right is bankrolled by fossil fuel interests (e.g. the Koch brothers) so that is a non-starter.
If you were going to criticize the left for rejecting basic science, the whole “nature vs. nurture” controversy would be a much better example. The notion that little boys and girls are exactly the same before we socialize them with gender roles is a political dogma that doesn’t hold up against the science.
When Washington state tried to do that, most environmentalist groups opposed it because it returned the revenue to taxpayers rather than spending it on their pet projects: https://insideclimatenews.org/news/09112016/washington-state.... (Yes, most Republicans also opposed it, and they're wrong).
If you were going to criticize the left for rejecting basic science, the whole “nature vs. nurture” controversy would be a much better example.
Totally agreed. I only didn't mention that because it has more of a tendency to derail the conversation.
It also makes virtually no sense to tax carbon on the state level anyway.
Up here in WA state we're still having to deal with the fallout from Hanford that is causing serious problems 50+ years later.
Most of the arguments around GMOs are along a similar vein, we don't deny that the science behind it works. Just that it's very poor policy to have a single giant conglomerate control the majority of the food production in the US. Heck, I think GMOs targeting drought tolerant areas are awesome, but ones where they can enforce IP control over farmers is pretty abhorrent to me.
Saying that the left is ignoring science is a pretty disingenuous foundation of a position to take.
At the federal level I think of identity politics as mostly garbage used to spin things cooked up by lobbyists, but maybe this congress is actually playing that game in earnest... Which is really terrifying, because those identities are bonkers.
The republicans voted on the bill without reading it, as has become common.
If anything, an increasingly major issue today is 'degree inflation.' Ever more jobs that have no real necessity of college graduates are requiring degrees nonetheless presumably because there are now plenty of university educated individuals willing to fill low skill and generally low wage roles. But this action is really hurting the middle class and the efficiency of the US job market. The decision also comes with a number of paradoxically negative consequences for employers. The term I'm using, degree inflation, is borrowed from an extremely informative paper from the Harvard Business School on this exact topic: http://www.hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work/Documents/dis...
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Educational_attainment_in_the_...
The colleges and universities have become corporations that run on student loans and graduate student slave labor. This has to change, and it will be a painful process no matter what happens.
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...
For example, my graduate students are on NSF grants that I applied for. The grants pay the graduate students a stipend and health insurance costs, they pay my university the full cost of in-state tuition and fees, and they pay overhead on those costs. These are all budgeted for.
You can argue that graduate students and universities are just another special interest lobbying the government for a tax exemption that benefits them. There is nothing special about graduate education when you're conferring something that's inherently valuable (namely MS and PhD degrees) to a lucky few.
You could further argue that it's unfair to ask blue-collar workers in fly-over states to pay higher taxes because of the impact of such a subsidy.
There is a lot to like in the tax bill: interest on second homes isn't going to be subsidized nor are new mortgage interest on homes over $1M. Frankly, I think it should have been applied to ALL homes over $1M since many economists have argued vociferously that such an exemption is a huge subsidy to the high-cost states.
I'd also like to see a revisitation of the taxation of carried-interest for hedge funds. There is no reason to consider performance bonuses as a return on capital if they don't have any basis in the investment/capital at risk.
But arguing that graduate students (LUCKY graduate students) are worthy of some kind of exemption is just lobbying. You could easily make the same argument for active-duty armed service members. Frankly, I'd support a tax reduction on those people. They've suffered from our national follies to a disproportionate degree.
This tax cut is solely focused on corporations and was fixated on hitting a 20% tax rate. The corporate tax rate could have been 22% or 28% with out the need to scrounge money every other place they could and yet still add 1 to 1.5 trillion to the national debt.
No corporation is going to make investments because of this, there just going to horde it in the Cayman Islands or issue dividends then will also end up in the Cayman Islands. Funny how the repatriation of capital exemption wasn’t in this bill. So to your point. Both blue collar workers and grad students are now subsidizing corporate profits that will sit idle in foreign accounts.
The overall tenor of your post is a bit disingenuous. The data tells us that getting a PhD does not substantially improve your material existence, or at least that the picture is murky.
The data also tells us that the science that comes out of the research performed during those PhDs has an enormous positive ROI for society.
So in other words, phd students are under-paid take a lifelong financial hit to provide large but diffuse benefits to society, benefits that most students won't be able to capture because, well, that's the nature of basic science..
> You can argue that graduate students and universities are just another special interest lobbying the government for a tax exemption that benefits them
Since everything's a special interest, we might as well throw the money at oil executives?
No, of course not. Some of those special interests really are worth investing in. Roads, schools, and labs provide enormous and measurable, if diffuse, value.
> You could further argue that it's unfair to ask blue-collar workers in fly-over states to pay higher taxes because of the impact of such a subsidy.
This bill will most harm the public and low-endowment universities in those flyover states. The schools those workers' children will attend will be less well-staffed and there will be fewer opportunities for funded graduate programs.
> You could easily make the same argument for active-duty armed service members. Frankly, I'd support a tax reduction on those people
Good news: they already receive very large tax exemptions. As they should; the armed services are also an important special interest...
I meet plenty of PhD's in my regular practice. Not every person earns a PhD and stays in academia. PLENTY earn that degree and use it as a stepping stone to a high-paying job in the private sector.
As for oil executives: they're not going to be the biggest winners here. Shareholders likely will be. That repatriated capital is going to lead to a huge share buyback and dividends. Wanna know who's going to get a large chunk of that? PENSION FUNDS for state employees. If you think CALPERS doesn't stand to benefit from this surging stock market you're not paying attention.
I wonder if you realize how much you sound like a lobbyist? Without a tax subsidy, there is a calamity. Every time someone warns that a tax increase will affect investment or job creation or cause a shift in the deployment of capital, people in favor of said increase downplay those fears.
All the folks who said that a $15 minimum wage would kill job creation....were those folks wrong?
And here we are, hearing that the removal of a special tax treatment will massively impact graduate education. Well, maybe. Maybe not. I guess we will have to see.
So the cost to a student to receive a PhD goes up a bit. Big deal. Is that gonna kill research entirely? There is already a glut of PhDs here in the USA. Maybe a few less isn't such a bad thing.
Cool anecdotes and all, but there's data on this question and you're wrong. PhDs do not increase lifetime earnings.
This isn't a case of dueling anecdotes. It's a normal fact we can verify with data.
> As for oil executives: they're not going to be the biggest winners here. Shareholders likely will be.
And I suppose oil executives store their fortunes in bold bars...?
> PENSION FUNDS for state employees
This is such a BS excuse for favoring capital.
It is, in fact, possible to write tax code that differentiates between the two.
The current tax bill does not, in fact, actually do so.
And worse, it even rolls back benefits that did differentiate between "filthy rich" and "working class saving for retirement"!
> I wonder if you realize how much you sound like a lobbyist?
Says the one conflating upper class investment income with pension funds while defending a policy that slashes retirement benefits and dismissing hard facts with personal anecdotes about how well-off people making 30k/yr are...
1. What it shows: Students good enough to get accepted into PhD programs are good enough to get paid more in general. Good we're talking about this -- the market clearly values these people!
2. What it misses: ... But what if a PhD-capable person instead just went directly into industry? What is the opportunity cost of taking a pause of 4-7 years to do R&D for the public?
3. What economists found: By looking at students graduating from a good school and therefore PhD-capable, and then comparing the result of them doing 4-7 years of PhD vs not.. the students who took time to contribute to science lost out on a ton of money. They're quite literally donating their time to society.
Phrasing it as _subsidizing_ these people to do R&D is misleading. The reality is the government is underpaying for the public service of growing the economy, especially relative to market rates for people equally qualified to make a bunch of $$$ working on social media ads and fancy juice machines.
But that breaks the narrative. The actual studies show the salary sweet spot is somewhere between a BS and MS. That means federal institutions must _lure_ PhDs, not drive them away.
This sort of uncharitable swiping breaks the HN guidelines. So do insinuations of astroturfing, which you did elsewhere in this thread. I realize it can be hard to restrain oneself when someone else is wrong on the internet, but please make the effort and edit such acid out of your comments if you want to keep posting here. You can always set 'delay' in your profile to give yourself time to edit before others see your comment; that's what I do.
If you care about economic impact, you should be increasing funding, not eating the seed corn.
And as my above post, it seems you are either unaware of what R&D does and who does it, or are effectively performing the work of a paid Russian troll.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-breaks-for-the-military
Additionally, and in direct analogy, GI Bill tuition is not taxed.
> They pay taxes on their income just like everyone else does.
Not on combat pay, and spouses get special treatment regardless of status.
> That includes state income tax as well.
And don't forget about commissaries, most especially in the states without income tax.
Combat pay is a tiny portion of a service-member pay. And no, spouses don't get special treatment. You're making things up to justify your argument.
Go ahead and read that list over again slowly and tell me if you think that list compares to the large governmental subsidy that is provided to support non-taxation of tuition for graduate students.
Because I know that list front and back and none of those minuscule allotments compare to treating $50K of tuition per year as tax-free income.
Yes.
> and tell me if you think that list compares to the large governmental subsidy that is provided to support non-taxation of tuition for graduate students.
From my original post:
>> Additionally, and in direct analogy, GI Bill tuition is not taxed.
It's not just comparative. It's Literally. Identical.
> And no, spouses don't get special treatment. You're making things up to justify your argument
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Spouses_Residency_Rel...
Mind you, I'm not claiming that these benefits should go away, or even that they're enough. But claiming that military members don't receive as many benefits as grad students is absurd.
>From my original post: >> Additionally, and in direct analogy, GI Bill tuition is not taxed. >It's not just comparative. It's Literally. Identical.
It's not identical. The GI Bill is a benefit that's conferred on a servicemember FOR SERVICE TO THE NATION. That service includes the possibility that a servicemember will be killed during their service. That's the job. It's not taxed because it's a benefit they earned for selfless service to the nation.
A good buddy of mine is going to law school with his. He did 20 years of service as a Marine.
You want a benefit like that? EASY. Go do 20 years in the Marines. You can have all the tax-free tuition you want.
> And no, spouses don't get special treatment. You're making things up to justify your argument https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_Spouses_Residency_Rel....
Again. This act was for the protection of servicemembers against loss of job or loss of home because of a deployment. It doesn't give them special tax treatment. It forestalls things like foreclosure or garnishment of wages because of deployment to a war zone. There is no special tax treatment for spouses. They pay tax. I paid tax. Just like everyone else in the USA.
You don't understand the arguments you're making.
It is an identical benefit.
The justification for the benefit is not identical. In one case we're providing additional compensation to veterans. In another case we're providing an incentive for research.
But the benefit itself really is identical.
> This act was for the protection of servicemembers against loss of job or loss of home because of a deployment
Civilians also lose jobs / are forced to relocate?
Pointing out that someone gets special treatment is not an argument that they don't deserve that special treatment.
> You don't understand the arguments you're making.
You seem to be under the impression that I think these benefits are either unreasonable or sufficient.
I don't believe either.
I'm merely pointing out that there are many provisions in the tax code that are specific to military personnel and families.
Perhaps they deserve those benefits, as you argue. And I agree. But that doesn't mean those things aren't special treatment in the tax code.
> They pay tax. I paid tax. Just like everyone else in the USA.
Including graduate students. Excluding billions of dollars over at Apple.
Maybe if we stopped fighting over who's getting screwed more and started taxing extreme wealth we wouldn't have to choose a winner in this apparent culture war?
Graduate students get special treatment which bumps up their real compensation.
So do military families.
What makes this treatment "special" is that it's targeted at a subpopulation. That's all.
You're the one attaching moral weight to these purely factual statements.
In particular, state schools have a lot less flexibility in terms of how we allocate funding to graduate students; our pay rates are set by California state law, and the salary of every single employee of the university is subject to public scrutiny [0]. We cannot simply dip into our endowments to correspondingly raise wages, since the amount which can be withdrawn each year is strictly capped as a portion of the total, to ensure the long-term growth of the fund (see [1], "Endowment Spending Policy").
It is true that colleges and universities have grown tremendously in their size and scope. This is a popular anecdote (and often repeated without data), but consider this: a university has become a mini-society in a lot of ways. Universities offer an unbelievable number of services and drive their own mini-economies. They are often among the largest employers in their area, even in thriving metropolitan centers [2]. They provide health insurance, mental health care, their own police forces, job-searching centers, support groups, etc. As our broader American society scales back its social services, universities are increasingly on the hook to provide these services to students.
I agree that universities have grown too large, and resent extremely large unnecessary salaries (for example for sports coaches), but I also acknowledge that such waste exists in any sufficiently large and complex system, and it is a constant and active process to limit its effects. Condemning the whole system on account of this seems like cutting off the nose to spite the face.
[0]: https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ [1]: http://www.ucop.edu/investment-office/_files/report/UC_Annua... [2]: http://www.ucla.edu/about/facts-and-figures
I'm sympathetic to criticisms of universities but let's not overstate the case: slaves have no choice and grad students do. It's unwise to go to grad school in most disciplines (https://jakeseliger.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-know-befo...) but people go of their own free will despite the fact that one hour on Google will return dozens of excellent reasons not to go.
I hate to turn social issues into black and white, partisan debates. But anti-intellectualism and the denigration of education is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon in the U.S. It's used often by the Republican party here to criticize "elites" and is employed by a long list of other power-hungry demagogues throughout world history [1].
Isaac Asimov wrote a column in January 1980 in Newsweek that describes this phenomenon in the U.S.:
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."
I encourage everyone to read the full column [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism [2]: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...
This is nonsense. There’s no Illuminati out to make the population dumber. There _is_ a bunch of identity politics ignoramouses out the gut colleges that “corrupt our values” and it’s an easy thing to point to as a win when your base (who keep you in power) are mouth breathing retards who see higher education (and intelligence in general) as nuisances.
Make no mistake: their goal is more money for companies, and this is merely a way to keep their base happy so they can keep their shareholders happy.
Editing this upon a close rereading of [1]. I'm not sure if that refers to the same tuition tax credit. Any armchair tax lawyers care to weigh in?
But, I have called my representatives and asked them to make sure that the credit survives reconciliation of the bill between the House and Senate, because I don't think that graduate student pay should be used as a bargaining chip.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/30/what-...
[1]: https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/college-and-education/d...
> As you’ve probably heard, one of the ways Republicans intend to pay for their tax
> giveaway, is to change the tax code so that graduate students will now need to
> pay taxes on “tuition”—a large sum of money (as much as $50,000/year) that
> PhD students never actually see, that can easily exceed the stipends they do
> see, and that’s basically just an accounting trick that serves the internal needs
> of universities and granting agencies.
Let me phrase this situation a different way. Assume I start working for Bloomberg's HF trading group. They want me to live closer to my office and buy my a penthouse apartment half a block down. They pay for it (made the contract, own the building, pay the staff, etc) but it's in my name. It's my apartment. Is that part of my income? Shouldn't I be taxed for this apartment? I never actually see the money! I never actually get to spend the money! It's just something that has to happen for me to be on Bloomberg's HF trading team!
I think that should be taxable. What do you think?
>> Charge: +$60,000 from Graduate School Division
>> Payment: -$60,000 from Graduate Department of XYZ
And that was not the value of the education either. Even in quarters where you are not physically in the school, with no classes, library access, etc. you would still be "charged" that magic number. It's just a way to allocate expenses between each department and the graduate school.
In most cases they will just change the accounting to something even weirder, and the government will get nothing. Some schools, with arcane rules from donors (such as that their money can only be used for education and not infrastructure) will have problems. But for the most part it's just a stupid thing to do from the govt side, that will just complicate things even more.
> And that was not the value of the education either
> Even in quarters where you are not physically in the school, with no
> classes, library access, etc. you would still be "charged" that magic
> number. It's just a way to allocate expenses between each department
> and the graduate school.
Put it another way: I don't care if my employer just spent a bunch of money on a better building or more comfy office chairs. I don't care if the IT department charges my unit $XYZ for expenses (call it "tuition" if you want).
That's something that happens on the back end of my employer, and is not an income for me. That's the same thing for grad school. I got paid 20k to work on research, teach, grade, and help in maintaining the school's name so they can get MBA students (who ultimately pay the bills in our case). Why should I care if one unit at my school charged another unit? Heck, I paid taxes and social security on those 20k, got health insurance, had a W2, etc.
For all practical purposes, PhD students are employees. Make them pay taxes on their income, and not on the incidental expenses of their employers.
"Required" and "compensation" do not go together. Things are either one or the other.
>I think that should be taxable. What do you think?
I think the company should be indicted for money-laundering and for the unethical labor practice of forcing you to live in the condo they're laundering money through.
If the tax increase goes through, universities will probably respond my significantly increasing "indirects" and decreasing tuition. They could twiddle the numbers so that the university still makes the same average off of every grant, and students take homes don't change at all.
But there would be in important difference: from a PI's perspective, grad students would be relatively cheaper. Paradoxically, taxing tuition may have the net effect of creating more grad student positions (while decreasing the spend on capital investments).
Though I think in this particular case, for my particular institution, the University could totally mitigate all financial cost to graduate students by cutting the subsidy the University gives to the athletics programs (about 15% of the athletics budget is paid for by the students in the form of fees the students are assessed on top of their tuition).
That's the only rational explanation of what's going on.
If that wasn't the intent, the people who created and voted for this bill are the biggest idiots.