Speaking from present experience: "tuition remission" is a sort of imaginary quantum payment. I call it that because first they "charge" you tuition, then they

Speaking from present experience: "tuition remission" is a sort of imaginary quantum payment. I call it that because first they "charge" you tuition, then they issue you a "remission". The result is that no money ever actually enters or leaves your bank account, and they write something in a database somewhere to say that you "paid tuition" and are therefore legally a "student" (eg: legal to treat as a student, put under university behavioral discipline, exempt from certain labor laws, etc). You could try to say that it really is "tuition" for "coursework", but most graduate students, most of the time, aren't actually taking any classes that use a classroom or get taught by a professor. Most of their/our "credit hours" are in things labeled stuff like "Readings" or "Dissertation Continuation" that, again, help the university maintain a bureaucratic fiction that someone who has a cubicle and a workstation and spends their time in a lab is not, in fact, working for the university but instead being done a favor by the kindness of the university. But as I said, you don't actually make a penny, so I wouldn't really call it "wages".