3 ms·

Universities are abusing this tax waiver and treating graduate student has employees. It is high time this waiver be removed

• pishpash 9y ago
  Then make universities pay this tax, not graduate students.
  • mattkrause 9y ago
    The universities also don't pay many of the grad students, particularly in the sciences. Instead, the students are funded by training grants (to the department or program), and as RAs on grants to individual faculty members. These overwhelmingly come from federal sources, so the net impact on the budget is likely to be zero: these grants would need to increase to cover the taxes, which would then go right back to the feds. I could get behind funding fewer grad students and using that money to actually do some research instead, but I think asking grad students to absorb a $3,000 pay cut on a $20-30k salary is pretty harsh, especially since many of the "tuition" payments don't cover an actual class.
  • civilian 9y ago
    Is there that much of a difference? If the graduate students need to pay the tax, then new grad students will take that into account when comparing stipends.
• Fomite 9y ago
  The waivers are meant to acknowledge that while graduate students must technically be enrolled in classes while working on the research portion of their degrees, they are not taking up the resources tuition is supposed to be paying for. So tuition gets waived, and they don't get taxed on a "gift" that's entirely for handling an administrative process.
  • mattkrause 9y ago
    Exactly! At least 50% of graduate classes are something like "preparing for qualifying exams" or "dissertation research in progress" and meet zero times a week for zero hours.