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A grad student working a different job has to pay taxes on the income used to pay tuition, as does a student who borrows the tuition and repays it while working
by leereeves 9y ago
A grad student working a different job has to pay taxes on the income used to pay tuition, as does a student who borrows the tuition and repays it while working a different job in the future.(1) This is a very specific favoritism - not even favoring all grad students, but only grad students working for universities. And ultimately, favoring the universities by lowering their grad student labor costs.
1: Excluding some limited credits and deductions of at most a few thousand dollars each. Will graduate assistants be eligible for these?
- digitaltrees 9y agoWhat PhD program requires the payment of tuition?
- leereeves 9y agoWhat PhD program allows students who aren't working for the university as a teaching or research assistant and doesn't charge them tuition?
- digitaltrees 9y agoHow is that relevant. Grad students work because they are doing research relevant to their degree and are teaching so they can learn to be professors. It’s all part of the program. The get paid for their work and they pay tax on it. The government pays their tuition in the form of a grant or the university endowments pays the tuition because the university needs to cover operational costs. Tuition has nothing to do with a grad students income. The only reason they are invoiced for it is that represents their portion of the university operating budget.
- leereeves 9y agoTuition is part of the compensation graduate assistants receive for working for the university. 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.
- digitaltrees 9y agoIn what way is it compensation? So we should calculate sales tax based on sticker price rather than actual paid price? Grad students receive a salary for their work and a discount from the sticker price of the tuition. They are separate transactions.
- leereeves 9y agoThe transactions are tied: grad students have other (often much better) options for employment; they choose to work for a grad school because they value the free tuition.
- eli_gottlieb 9y agoNo, they choose to work in PhD programs because they value doing research.
- candiodari 9y agoYes, because as we all know in any company if you learn from your colleague you pay him a rate commensurate with how much effort he put in it. 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).