Grad students protest GOP's tax hike and prepare to fight about tuition
theverge.com
theverge.com
I think a problem is many Americans think they have the top universities in the world, but you forget that is really only the ivy league which most Americans will not be able to attend anyway.
I went to a decent university in the US, before going to the Netherlands instead. I got to say it was much better in the Netherlands for several reasons:
1. Most of my professors shockingly spoke BETTER english than at the US university. WHY? Because in the US there is an abundance of professors/teachers from foreign countries, especially from India and various asian countries. These professors often pronunciations of the english language which is hard for an American or European to understand. Dutch professors in contrast speak very clear english. Yes dutch is the native language, but at Master level all courses are taught in english if you don't speak dutch. For undergrad there are several special schools which do english only teaching.
2. More modern facilities. They had better equipped university library. Newer computers in the computer labs etc.
3. They teach you more about how to think. I felt US university was closer to a high school experience. A lot of hand holding and focused on learning lots of stuff. In the Netherlands it was less workload but harder problems. You spend more time thinking than doing.
4. More time with your professor and less time with student assistants and other non-professionals.
5. Easer to be a student in general. You don't need a car to get around. Dutch cities are very walk and bike friendly, and there is lots of public transportation.
6. More FREEDOM! For young people there seems to be way too many restrictions in the US. Can't drink until 21. Gender separated dormitories etc. I find that in the Netherlands and Europe in general you are treated more as an adult. You live in apartments with other students on campus (or off) and there are nobody going around enforcing lots of stupid rules.
Accepting foreign residence as U.S. American under the present and proposed tax regime may not be a panacea. We pay taxation on foreign income; and if the tax regime changes to impute an estimated tuition cost, you may be in the same boat as the one you started. For all intents and purposes, the double taxation exemption is useless — especially if you live in a country with a higher nominal cost of living than the U.S.
This is not normal. It is one of two countries to tax its citizens when domiciled abroad. The other is Eritrea.
I’ll be frank: I had only one thing to be excited about in this tax bill, and that was the possibility of rescinding citizenship-based taxation (CBT) and moving to residence-based (RBT), but I think the Senate draft doesn’t include this provision. The rest of the law is garbage as far as I am concerned.
But back to the original point, the U.S. is toast. Get out of there. That’s what I have done in my Fortress Zürich. This is a great place to raise a family and live. Each time I return to the U.S., I cannot help but be bombarded with realizations of its regressive characater and barbarism.
We tend to be biased against results from outside the major ivy league institutions because ivy league results are reported in the press as "harvard professor finds X" whereas the rest of the world has its findings reported as "researches discover Y", or if they are lucky "scientists from country X discover Y". This leads to the extremely superior branding of the top US universities which everyone can name, while they struggle to name 3 of the best institutions in Europe.
Prestigious universities matter for PhD students if you "fail" , meaning you were unable to produce significant work worth mentioning. Then you can use your prestige to get a job in industry.
By giving a tuition-waiver instead of "free tuition" they can consider this a business expense and write off the tuition.
The worst part about this is the write off gets bigger if tuition is bigger.
Don't fall victim to distilling things down to a headline. Read deeper and understand.
It's not just about what things do but how they do it and in this case this had to go.
Yet they crush students with unbelievably high tuition. We have a student loan crisis, that is mentally destroying millennials. They refuse to pay grad students a living wage. They refuse to open up publicly funded research. They overfund huge sports teams while underfunding much needed scientific research.
Universities may have been a beacon of science before, but now they are a profit-seeking parasite destroying students and true scientific progress.
Endowments:
Harvard - 35 billion
Yale - 25 billion
Stanford - 22 billion
Princeton - 21 billion
MIT - 12 billion
Upenn - 10 billion
Texas A&M - 9 billion
Why do these universities need taxpayer money AND force students to take loans ?!
https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...
In fact PhD's are merely a collateral damage in ending tution tax exemption which affects all students (and represents a much larger chunk when you account for number of undergrads). It's just that in other cases "per-student" effects are much lower, since either the student has no income or the lack of exemption mere dissuades parents from filling jointly.
This is a dubious tactic adopted by a sleazy political party to ram a bill through congress by taxing literally everything they can in order to make their other tax cuts look revenue neutral.
Actually - Not merely slashing. Money should actually flow, but in the opposite direction.
If these tuition charges are merely overhead, then universities need to dispense with this accounting fiction and re-negotiate their overhead rates with the granting agency, who may decide they get better value at other institutions.
If tuition is really a charge to cover some services a graduate student directly receives from the university, then the waiver is income to the graduate student and ought to be taxed the same way tuition remission is taxed for other university employees.
Say a company is paying Bob $40k to build a better mouse trap. He pays tax on the full $40k.
Then, there's a national mouse problem, so the government gives the company $20k to stimulate research into better mouse traps.
The company takes that money and offers to pay $20k worth of Bob's housing, food, and commute every year, but now only pays Bob $20k a year in salary.
Bob doesn't mind this because he has the same disposable income after all is said and done. Except now, Bob only has to pay taxes on $20k.
The only thing they get "tax free" is tuition, which they shouldn't be paying because in most cases they aren't even taking any classes.
That's my point. If you swap the $20k in my example to tuition, the economics is exactly the same. They're being charged it either way. The fact that the university is giving it "for free" allows them to pay the grad student that much less. As a result, taxable income vanishes.
(1) shitty programs make the student pay for everything; these programs are irrelevant to the conversation.
Some universities, not universities in general.
Wow, 5 years into a welfare PhD. Not exactly quantum chromodynamics, but she is an expert at living off the state. Seems more to me like a bunch of whiny socialist wanting everything free. I'm taxed, as income, for any grad classes my employer pays for. I'd say they are just closing a loophole. It goes both ways.
But now I am confused. With this kind of uncertainty, I don't know what to do.
Also, you may want to apply to some schools outside of the US as well, e.g., Canada, UK, etc.
A reason to not forget this is that anglo-saxon countries usually have high tuition fees, while outside the anglo-saxon world you can frequently find tuition free or schools with very low tuition.
It is not like lower tuition means worse quality. I've a master partly both in the US and the Netherlands, and the dutch university was much better. Better facilities, better professors, better designed programs.
Of course top American universities are the best in the world, but once you go below that level, American universities are not necessarily that good. University quality varies much more widely in the US and UK e.g. In Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Germany etc, quality will be more even.
After getting a graduate degree it is also fairly straightforward to become permanent resident, if that’s important to you.
Actually, people do not know this, because a lot of people have never met grad students. That is one of the reasons Republicans can get away with this: their base has no clue what this is about and will probably not be affected by it.
Unfortunately, with this guy at the helm for the next couple of years, nothing will be sacred.
PS. Is it OK to post right articles on HN, or no dissenting allowed? Ex: Would this make it to the home page or nah? Asking for a friend. http://twitter.com/TheEconomist/status/933013221824397312