Huh? This type of thing is a boom for business. They – and every tax preparer out there – live for changes in the code. It makes their jobs meaningful. If we ever did get to a postage card-sized tax form, they’d have no job.
I work in IT a lot of the time. Getting this amount of change into the software correctly in a year will be a nightmare. And those of us who use the software are going to suffer – bugs will be rampant. I feel sorry for the developers, analysts, testers, and project managers (not the executives) of those companies.
Well just talked to my advisor who said the uni isn’t telling them anything. She said at least half of the department both students and faculty have shown up in her office worried.
She said whatever the decision is will cone from well above her. The department doesn’t have the resources to do much of anything.
This is interesting: only about 1 in 4 PhD students receive a tuition waiver.
A couple of things about that:
- Pretty much EVERY student gets the waiver for 2-3 years because they are taking classes prior to passing quals and moving into the research phase of their project. So almost every student has SOME period when they get a waiver. How schools handle the tuition portion after that 2-3 year period varies. Some schools are still giving waivers, some aren’t (students aren’t actually in the classroom much if at all during the later years of the PhD process).
- There are a considerable number of students in late years of their PhD who are just trying to complete writing their thesis – some of them don’t even live on campus. They may not be getting a tuition waiver, too.
- Some schools give tuition waivers and stipend to masters students (typically they have terminal masters degrees, and want to have those master students act as TAs there – my kid applied to one of those programs just in case she didn’t get into a doctoral program).
There are still 145,000 students getting a waiver in a given year (at least based on 2012 data). And all of them would see a tax hike with no more income in their pocket if the House bill prevails on that issue.
That is just plain incorrect, as some of us have been trying to point out (repeatedly).
@bluebayou, what part of the entire quote:
is just plain incorrect. All 145000 who receive waivers will see a tax increase.
In what universe are grad students NOT going to get a tax hike?
Right now none of these tuition waivers are taxed…at all. If they are now taxed…everyone getting one will see a tax increase.
Why do they always focus on STEM students? S is a Psych major and gets a tuition waiver also, as do lots of other majors. Sheesh!
When I reached the point where I was only working on my dissertation writing/research, I only had to register for 1 credit/semester in order to have ongoing student status. I don’t recall if I was paying that myself or not, as it wasn’t much.
PhD in history here. Yup, tuition waiver every single semester I am here.
No one should go into a PhD that you have to pay for- especially if your goal is to go into the academy.
It’s too late for me to edit #463. The CNN article gives a percentage for all doctoral students, which seems misleading. However, if you go back to the original NCES data source, only 47.6% of students in research doctorates are receiving an assistant-ship. However, this isn’t accurate:
It may be true that the tier 1 schools fully fund virtually all of their PhD students, but you can’t generalize that to all schools.
My kid applied to some lower tiered schools, and ALL the PhD programs she applied to had an arrangement where they had to TA for a couple of years, then RA. They got a stipend for all those years, and had a tuition waiver at least for the first 2-3 years. “Fully funded” is in the eye of the beholder, but even when the stipend is crappy, they still give the tuition waiver. There might be a very small number of students who either are independently wealthy and can afford to be unfunded, or some who got some kind of fellowship from outside their school that is paying their bills. But almost every PhD student falls under the model where they get tuition waivers.
You’re just wrong about that. The NCES data shows only about half of research doctoral students are receiving either a RA or TA in any given year.
Uh, no. NSF fellowships are not taxable. School fellowships – like Romani has – are not taxable. 1st year grad students who are not TA’ing won’t be hit. (All of these have been pointed out before.)
Sure, many may be impacted – if the University does nothing, which is highly unlikely, IMO* – but it ain’t gonna be “all” that receives a tax hike (at least as currently written).
*Just like when funded Grad programs started offering health insurance – it was a significant cost, but they got the money from somewhere bcos it was the right thing to do.
But 145,000 appear to be getting waivers. So what is your real point?
You are not required to pay taxes on the portion of the fellowship used for tuition, but the remainder of the fellowship is taxable. The same applies to any other fellowship. (Speaking from experience.)
This varies from one university another. Many require all PhD students to register for a full load of classes and pay the appropriate tuition. Those writing their dissertations register for phantom classes.
An alternative is to go on leave, but you’ll still be charged a fee ($2000 a year at my university) and won’t be eligible for institutional funding.
They started offering health insurance because otherwise they couldn’t attract as many students without it. And that money comes out of undergrad tuition or state subsidies to the college, so it helped drive up the cost of higher ed. As this daft proposal would do as well.
Sure, 145k maybe getting tuition waivers, but not ALL are them will be taxable (as previously established numerous times).
Correct. And that is the key issues that many on this thread have concerns: its about taxing the tuition waiver. But you just reinforced by point: the tuition waiver from fellowship is NOT taxable today and won’t be taxable if the current bill passes.
Exactly my point.
Yale will be offering grad students an additional $4500/yr stipend if they have a child. Great idea – to attract the students that they want to attract – but clearly Yale can afford it, just as Yale could afford to pay a larger stipend to any grad student that TA’s a class. As could Harvard, Princeton and many others, and they likely will. So now, we instill a little competition among the top Unis. For example, Michigan is not gonna want to lose out to HYP for top students, will they? Perhaps its time that the Unis start paying grad students a living wage!
(Note, Dartmouth doesn’t have to play since the all/most grad students at Dartmouth do not have to TA; no TA, not tax impact for that term. Again, not “all”.)
This is slightly dated but here’s another view on whether there really is a science PhD shortage.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/does-the-us-produce-too-m/