My kid will make around $23K a year WITH summer lab work. Not everyone goes to MIT and gets a stipend over $30K a year. Is that low enough for you? And her federal tax bill will go from about $900/year (with the Lifetime Learning credit) to about $2,700/year. That does not include the increase in state taxes she will pay as well – they should go up by about $1,000. So her total tax will be about $3,000 higher than prior to the tax bill passing, still with the same income.
I wonder if grad schools will just change the cost of tuition…to almost free, and pay for work done in the classroom. Nothing stopping them from doing that. People will change things based upon tax policy, and if the schools want the students, they need to do something.
It’s clear that some people on this thread have no actual contact with grad students.
Also, this is many years of our lives. It’s not like a 2 year masters and you’re done. My program completion time is about 6 years because we have to essentially write a book after we’re done with classes.
I can’t even leave academia either because right now, I’m not in a position to look for and work another job. Why? Because I can’t lose insurance. Yes, I can go on medicaid if I lose it but who the hell knows if medicaid is going to be available to someone like me next year unless I have a kid.
Yay.
I am not directly impacted by this, but I guarantee that I will be impacted if the quality of academic research does down the drain. Do you think companies are going to pick up fundamental research? Ha. They cut, cut, cut even the basic R&D because it is one way to drive their immediate earnings up. Who cares if the pipeline dries up in the future? The decision maker will be outta there with their cashed in stock options.
Does anyone know what the next step is? What is the deal with the Senate plan? Does both the House and Senate have to pass something, and then they change it based upon what additional lobbyists are bribing them with?
How many classes does your typical PhD student actually take? Is it a full load of classes for the entire 6 years? A full load for one or two years and then basically none? If a PhD student is paying their own way, are they paying full tuition even when they are taking only a few or no classes?
Seems to me the real value of the tuition waiver is dependent on how many credit hours you take, because that’s how the school charges. Schools have set up this “waiver” system because it is easy, it didn’t matter tax-wise, and in cases where the student doesn’t get a waiver, the school collects a few dollars. So if is it typical that PhD students don’t take many classes in later years, much of this problem could be mitigated by the school tracking and reporting only the tuition value of the classes actually taken.
Yes, the Senate has to pass something, then they work out a compromise bill in committee. Then both houses have to vote to pass whatever the committee comes up with. Then the President has to sign it.
Does the committee meet with lobbyists? I wouldn’t be surprised… not sure about the bribes though. 
The Senate has to pass something (which isn’t a slam dunk – Ron Johnson has already said he isn’t happy with the current Senate bill – I think he says it doesn’t help enough small businesses), and I think Susan Collins isn’t happy with the ACA components. Noise is building about the automatic cuts to Medicare ($25 billion due to sequestration rules) that will happen if the bill passes, too. The Senate Republicans can only lose 2 votes and pass it. Then the bill goes through reconciliation where they try to hammer out a bill that resolves the differences between them. Then I think the bill gets voted on again, and goes to the president for signature.
I am unclear on when the winner of the Alabama Senate race is seated – the election is Dec 12, but Googling didn’t give me any clue when the winner takes their seat. If the Dem wins and they take their seat right after that, it could get even more interesting. Although I assume maybe they have to certify the election results before seating the winner – not clear how long that takes. But if Doug Jones wins, and the tax bill drags out, that could affect it as well.
Thanks for the info you two, I’ve been off the television lately. Sounds like it still has a ways to go yet.
Found a reference to the amount of revenue that will be generated by the tuition tax waiver:
And more of a hit on grad students when they eliminate the Lifetime Learning credit:
This is because they are consolidating to one credit that only undergrads can take going forward. So again… the grad students pay more.
The tuition waiver tax is crazy. My kid gets a half tuition waiver…bout $25,000.she has $1200 a year in income from her school position. Not exactly a cash cow of income.
So lovely…she might now get to pay axes on her tuition waiver…in addition to having to be a full pay health insurance purchaser.
Wonderful…just wonderful.
Hey, this will give all of us a break and boost the economy!
Or not. They are shameless.
Yes, but what percentage of PhDs spend their careers in college teaching positions? I’m guessing maybe half.
Sure, but students aren’t always sure whether they will teach or not. And you want your adjuncts to be qualified, don’t you? 
Okay, this is getting ridiculous—could the people pulling generalizations about grad school out of thin air at least do some googling before posting?
First of all: The number of classes for a PhD differs by program. For mine, it was 20 classes—that’s at the higher end, from talking to PhDs who got their degrees from other places, but it’s still well within norms, particularly for fields like mine where a masters isn’t a prerequisite for a doctorate.
A full load of classes was four of them, except for TAs/RAs, for whom it was three—and in every case, that was the maximum course load. (Well, I was also allowed to audit an additional course per semester, which I only did once.) This means that my coursework ran three years, since my fellowship required one year of TAship or RAship, with a light load in the final semester of the third year.
Also, and kind of important for the financial side of this: Not all grad programs charge by the credit hour. My graduate tuition was a (insanely high) amount of tuition charged as a flat amount for full-time attendance, plus a (not so insane, but still surprisingly high) flat amount charged for other fees that would have been the same if I was part-time. Further, once I was done with coursework and working full-time on the dissertation, that was considered full-time attendance, so full-time tuition (plus fees) was still in play, and would have still been taxed under the current proposal.
Considering that my income from my fellowship was about one-quarter of the total amount of tuition and fees, the tax implications would have been pretty stunning.
But simply resetting tuition to zero wouldn’t have been healthy for the university—yes, they waived tuition for the PhD students, but not for the professional degree students. And you know what? I agree with that. I mean, in all seriousness, waiving tuition for people to get high-financial-return degrees like MBAs and MDs? No.
Thanks for the reality check, dfb.
I’m not at all surprised by people having no idea what grad students do. People actually think I get summers off or something. =))
There do appear to some posters who appear to believe that graduate students are automatically inferior teachers with respect to undergraduate education and who are best avoided (by attending LACs).
Well, I had a couple of really bad TAs as well as the good ones. And at LACs you do get closer contact with profs who obviously have completed their PhDs; they have more research experience, more teaching experience, and can write rec letters that carry more weight than a TA can. But I don’t know anyone who thinks the research university experience would be better if most of the TAs left. And realistically most students don’t go to LACs – it isn’t like every student could just go down that path instead if the TA model breaks.
From post 949 - the feds will reap 5.4 billion over 10 years by taxing tuition wavers? They’ll actually bring in far less when students drop out of more expensive programs and schools readjust what their tuition is for these programs.
Our research universities will be gutted for a pittance. So some can have private jets…
Before you all get excited, again what’s stopping universities calling tuition waiver tuition scholarship?