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Biggest Reform EVER passed thread

TownieDeac said:
I've stayed off this thread since I figured out I was in over my head with arcane tax discussions (hasn't stopped me in the past) but this little bit they've snuck in about the grad tuition waiver has me back in. I would like to see someone come explain why this is either not as big a deal as I am reading it or it makes some sense.

My sister is in her fourth year of a PhD program at Emory studying antibiotic resistance. She's scared for what this means for finishing her education. She works 70 hour weeks making $30k, and if this passes, her taxable income will look more like $95k and she almost certainly couldn't afford to stay on, nor could the school help.

Of course she'll always have the uphill battle against the anti science whims of Congress, but this particular bill seems vicious and spiteful.
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I think the argument is essentially that the tuition waiver is income and should be treated as such. If that + stipend is not enough to live on/attract candidates, then the universities should pay them more or charge less for tuition. Obviously making that dramatic a change that abruptly would blow up the system as it operates now.

If you are a looking for a smart conservative economist, craig garthwaite is a good follow.
 
tiltdeac said:
I think the argument is essentially that the tuition waiver is income and should be treated as such. If that + stipend is not enough to live on/attract candidates, then the universities should pay them more or charge less for tuition. Obviously making that dramatic a change that abruptly would blow up the system as it operates now.

If you are a looking for a smart conservative economist, craig garthwaite is a good follow.
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What's to stop Universities from just charging zero (or $1) for tuition for those programs? Isn't the end result the same?
 
DistrictDeacon said:
What's to stop Universities from just charging zero (or $1) for tuition for those programs? Isn't the end result the same?
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I don't know. I would guess there would be some implications for the university if they did that, but I don't know enough to comment. Are there other students who actually pay that tuition? Maybe it has tax implications for the university? No clue.

But say my or your company wanted to send us back to school to get an MBA. They can put something like 5k toward the MBA for us pre-tax, but if they pay more than that we would be taxed on that tuition. The devil's advocate argument is why is that considered different? It certainly feels different when it is a university that is providing the benefit to its own employee in a system like our current post grad system.
 
TownieDeac said:
I've stayed off this thread since I figured out I was in over my head with arcane tax discussions (hasn't stopped me in the past) but this little bit they've snuck in about the grad tuition waiver has me back in. I would like to see someone come explain why this is either not as big a deal as I am reading it or it makes some sense.

My sister is in her fourth year of a PhD program at Emory studying antibiotic resistance. She's scared for what this means for finishing her education. She works 70 hour weeks making $30k, and if this passes, her taxable income will look more like $95k and she almost certainly couldn't afford to stay on, nor could the school help.

Of course she'll always have the uphill battle against the anti science whims of Congress, but this particular bill seems vicious and spiteful.
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Also treating tuition breaks for university employees as taxable income. Got to pay for that estate tax repeal.
 
The school could gross up the tuition benefit for taxes
 
TownieDeac said:
So the argument is that the system needs blowing up?
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I think the people who actually wrote the bill are mostly idiots who don't listen to what smart people tell them. I doubt any reasonable economist, even if they agreed in principle with the idea that tuition in this setting should be considererd income, would advocate for what is in this bill, which would just destroy the system.
 
sailordeac said:
no one can take y'all's constant caterwauling about Trump seriously, there is no tax reform bill yet
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Pretty sure the House passed a bill yesterday, you ignorant fuckwit. Maybe you should go back and watch Schoolhouse Rock while you slurp your applesauce.

Let's add civics to the list of things sailor doesn't teach.
 
Getting rid of the tuition waiver doesn't even make much fiscal sense because I doubt the provision would raise much revenue since most wouldn't be able to afford it. The bill also taxes the tuition benefits university employees receive for their children.

The moment the last of Fred Vautour’s five children walked across the stage as a Boston College graduate was priceless.

Not only did Mr. Vautour have the rare distinction of handing each of his children their diplomas, but he was also able to pay for their nearly 18 years of schooling by collecting trash, scrubbing toilets and mopping floors while the campus slept.

“As much as I struggled, it was incredible to be able to do that for them,” said Mr. Vautour, 64, who has worked the graveyard shift as a custodian at Boston College for 17 years. “I took this job for benefits, but never imagined this would be one of them.”
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A survey by College and University Professional Association of Human Resources found that of 300 schools that had employees receiving the tuition benefit, 50 percent earned $50,000 or less and 78 percent earned $75,000 or less.
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The House Just Voted to Bankrupt Graduate Students
 
The simplest comparison I've heard is that it's like taxing a coupon.

It's hard to imagine this is either punitive or ignorant. Given how Republicans feel about higher education, I think it's the former.
 
Plenty of grad stipends come from the university for TAs across fields.
 
TownieDeac said:
I'm all for paying grad students more but the $ doesn't even come from the university budgets now. Typically the stipend is taken out of grant funding, at least in hard sciences.
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Yeah not saying that universities would do that but this would be the mechanism to make the recepiant whole.
 
sailordeac said:
universities can reduce their administrative costs, to argue that they can't is nonsense
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I think that Led Zepplin was underrated during the 70s, wildly overrated during the 80s and early 90s, and has gone back to being underrated again.

Or is it only sailor who can post non-sequiturs?
 
Not defending the tax reform but graduate schools do a lot of bullshit for “tuition” especially for the STEM sciences. Taking Townie’s Emory example after the stipend there is tuition, fees, and health insurance. All of that is billed to you then everything except the fees is then “paid” by the university which is essentially charging you then wiping that bill off your account where no money actually ever moves. That last for two years while you are technically a student.

After two years and you successfully pass qualifying exams you are now a candidate and have joined a lab. At that point academic tuition is dropped, those first two years including summer school it’s like 70,000 dollars and the move fake money around stops. However there is a candidate tuition that is then paid by grants your lab has. At emory at one point this was way less than academic tuition, like 2000 dollars, but the school knowing they could milk more money from grants and labs raised it to like 10,000. So yes, the school could charge graduate tuition whatever they like.

I’ll also point out that Emory and most top research university programs have T32 training grants which actually do provide outside government money that covers that ridiculous first two years tuition, another reason why schools charge full price. The grants original intent is completely lost and perverted at major universities.
 
The main problem is that this would tax graduate students on money that they never see. At private schools, a graduate student's tax bill could literally match their actual pre-tax income. That's insane. And unlike Townie' s example, in the humanities the money is almost never grant-funded -- presumably it comes from individual department budgets? Or maybe they don't actually pay it at all. Despite this, humanities departments are incredibly cheap to run. Many English departments actually make money for the institution because they often cover courses required in the University curriculum with almost no overhead.

You'd think universities would push back because graduate students are their source of cheap labor.
 
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