The American dream is about having the opportunity to be successful, it’s not an entitlement.
The American dream is alive and well.
D1 current stipend $30,400K with $50K tuition waver.
AGI is $30,400
Taxable income is $20K after subtracting standard deduction and 1 exemption
Federal tax is $2534.
Under the new plan
AGI is $80,400
taxable is $80,400-12,000= $68400
at 12% that’s a federal tax of $8208
That’s an increase of $5674 in cash money!
This adds an extra $473 monthly expense student living on $30,400K.
I’m glad you think that’s minimal.
Which is exactly my point. Those third-tier units are not producing research that is cutting edge, that is pushing the knowledge envelope. Instead, their doctoral programs are cheap labor for undergrad teaching, yes?
To me, that’s a moral/ethical issue. Regardless, the tax question then becomes, why would we continue a policy that forces grad students into (below minimum?) wage labor to support a bunch of undergrads? Great loophole for the Unis, but good public policy?
@ClassicRockerDad, won’t this bump her up into the 25% bracket from some of her income? Using this tax calculator and putting in $80,400 as her W-2 income with single filing status and herself as 1 dependent, it shows $10,900 as her new tax liability. So that is even higher. 
This is just nuts. Be sure you contact your reps and Senators (and have her do it as well) with the specific numbers you are seeing. Specific examples help them.
Income mobility and economic opportunity in the US may not be at great as commonly assumed:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/04/21/science.aan3264.full
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/356/6336/398.full
http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/2015/07/economic-mobility-in-the-united-states
There are also geographical variations within the US:
http://www.equality-of-opportunity.org/assets/documents/mobility_geo.pdf
In addition, if widely available education is important to promote income mobility and economic opportunity, changing tax policy in ways that are unfavorable to both schools and students would be undesirable if the goal were to improve income mobility and economic opportunity.
You are right. I was using married brackets. She’s single. That’s a $700/month increase.
It’s really pretty unbelievable!
First of all, the repeal of the section doesn’t only apply to TAs. It applies to RAs too - the section in question explicitly and specifically mentions both research and teaching. There are lots of PhDs who get tuition remission simply for being an RA and they would also be taxed for their tuition remission.
Second of all, it’s not as simple as simply ‘raising’ the stipend level. In the case of NIH-funded grants - which is what much of science runs on - there’s a standardized stipend level that grantees can request if they have doctoral students working for them. As of 2017, that level is currently $23,844, already a kind of precarious amount for a doctoral student to live on especially in high cost-of-living areas. I’m fairly certain that the NSF also has a standardized stipend level that you can request for doctoral students although I cannot find it at the moment.
Even if the university has granted a fellowship to students for a stipend level, often that fellowship is cobbled together from a variety of sources, including departmental resources (which are probably partially funded by grants). Raising the stipend by enough to cover this tax for EVERY doctoral student covered by a stipend isn’t something that’ll be easily done by the majority of programs.
No it’s not, and it’s quite simple - the key word there is ‘certain.’ There are ALL KINDS of non-taxable benefits that you can get at your job that we, as a society - or at least our legislators - have decided are non-taxable.
For example, there are health savings accounts. I can contribute a certain amount every year to my HSA, and it reduces my taxable income by that exact amount. I can (and do) calculate the amount of money that I’m likely to spend on healthcare - either just in the next year, or if I want to save up for how much I will spend in the future - and save that money tax-free. Some of them are even more frivolous - for example, my company gives me $800 every year to spend on any fitness-related things I want and that’s also non-taxable.
It would therefore not be unreasonable or at all unprecedented for us as a society to continue to decide that tuition waivers are a nontaxable benefit of employment or student status at universities. The question is whether or not we value doctoral studies enough to keep it that way - or specifically, whether we value socioeconomic diversity of our doctoral students enough to keep it that way.
I didn’t address the research side. But I think it’s a huge mistake to think the only research that has value to society is “cutting edge” research that is “pushing the knowledge envelope.” A lot of non-cutting-edge science and technology research has valuable practical applications—often more so than the “cutting edge” stuff, actually. Here are a few examples of funded research projects at some second- and third-rank Midwestern public universities that strike me as very practical and valuable, but not cutting edge:
- Best practices in pavement design, materials, construction, and maintenance in wet-freeze climates such as Michigan
- Making wave energy an economical and reliable energy source for ocean measurement applications
- Driver behavior at highway-rail grade crossings using NDS data and driving simulators
- National Forest-wide monitoring for invasive earthworms and changes in forest soils to inform landscape-scale management and restoration [Note: this is actually a very serious problem in Upper Midwest forests where invasive earthworms are destroying the forests by radically altering soil composition].
Many of these schools also do work that directly benefits regional industries, e.g., mining and forestry in northern Minnesota. For example, a school in northern Minnesota is developing an alternative method of removing fine particles that rub off taconite (iron) pellets in the shipping process, promising a more effective and economical method of controlling particulate pollution that could save the industry millions of dollars while producing superior environmental outcomes. They also uniquely provide intensive (though not “cutting edge”) scientific study of regional natural resources—e.g., forests, aquatic systems, fisheries, wildlife, mineral complexes. This sort of research is not “cutting edge” and it may not “push the knowledge envelope,” but it helps fill the envelope with detail, nuance, and local variation that the “cutting edge” science can’t begin to touch. I would say this sort of research is valuable in its own right, but it also tends to have valuable practical applications as we seek to manage and exploit those natural resources both for profit and for the “soft” benefits they provide in making our world a better and more attractive place to live.
If someone wants the luxury experience of spending eight years of their life as a grad student studying medieval artifacts, sexuality during Prohibition, or English lit, the government shouldn’t nudge them away, but it shouldn’t artificially subsidize their luxury lifestyle either. A lot of social science research could generously be defined as junk: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/349/6251/aac4716. There’s a stronger argument we might need more STEM PhDs, but even there the evidence is mixed. The STEM candidates who lack the talent to compete at the top levels would be better off getting a Master’s in 2 years and then heading into industry, where most of them will end up eventually anyway.
I agree.
Let the industry titans cough up the dough, and pay RA’s/TA’s a fair/living wage…
That is one of the things the corporate tax pays for today… they DO cough up the dough for it. But there is a lot of basic research done in this country that is a building block that eventually helps with specific industry problems, too. It isn’t always obvious how it will play out or be used at first. It is also problematic to have a lot of private funding for university research – there are conflicts of interest that are problematic for researchers, and a lot of pressure to produce results that match what the funding organization wants to see.
Ah, the reproducibility argument, my favorite!
First of all, the social sciences aren’t the only field that has reproducibility problems. The life sciences - including the biomedical sciences and the clinical medical sciences that test your drugs and medical devices - do, too. In fact, their problems are far more buried because fewer people reproduce those studies at all - they are far more expensive to reproduce.
Also, there’s the scientific argument that reproducibility is a crock in social science anyway, and the inability to perfectly reproduce results by studies done exactly the same way isn’t really meaningful or necessary. (For example, Daryl Bem, a social psychologist at Cornell, has been able to repeatedly reproduce his studies providing evidence that ESP exists.) What’s more useful is a body of research that comes together from studies done in different ways with different approaches. But without being actually trained in social sciences research methods - aka, having a PhD in the field, as I do - it’s hard to know that from the outside.
I’d also note that I happen to work for one of the most valuable technology companies in the world WITH my social psychology PhD and they very much value the research that I do for them, which is stuff like trying to figure out whether the technology they build is actually usable and whether anyone will buy it.
Conclusions like this come from a misunderstanding of what these researchers are actually doing or how their research contributes to the life that we live today. First of all, I’m cracking up at the idea of humanities or social science PhDs living a “luxury” lifestyle or having a “luxury” experience in the first place, because anyone who did a bit of investigation would know that’s far from the truth.
But furthermore, the studies of humanities are studies of the things that give meaning to the world around us, and inform and influence STEM. For example, that historian studying medieval artifacts could uncover artifacts relevant to the ways in which medieval scientists studied their world, which could lead to us finding out that something we believed about science now is wrong (or something that we believed is wrong is right). Studying sexuality during Prohibition can uncover things like how alcohol laws affect changes in people’s sexual behavior (which is important for understanding the spread of sexually transmitted diseases) or can debunk the persistent myth that adolescents today are far more sexually active than adolescents on previous decades of the 20th century (which, by the way, historical data has).
And English literature? Literature literally shapes our world and the thoughts and actions around it. I mean, one of the watershed moments in Western history was the translation of the Bible into English in 1611. Martin Luther’s theses earlier than that literally changed the makeup of the world and was the catalyst in the Protestant Reformation, the precursor to the founding of the United States. The “little red book” written by Mao Zedong had a huge impact on China during the Cultural Revolution; Mein Kampf gives us a window into the psyche of Hitler; Uncle Tom’s Cabin helped lay the ground work for the Civil War and the eventual abolition of slavery; The Feminine Mystique sparked second-wave feminism and a series of civil rights wins for women in the United States…there are so many examples of how literature has changed the world. It has literally caused and ended wars, sparked scientific shifts in thought (On The Origin of Species was deliberately written for non-specialist readers), changed the way that humans thought and lived and carried on with their lives. It’s more than a little absurd to suggest that understanding the power that the written word has over people is only a luxury and not a necessary part of being a human being.
That’s not even accounting for the fact that professors of English literature also study and contribute scholarship into how to write and communicate, which is important across fields. My field (technology) is impossible without technical communication and documentation. Know how fake Twitter and Facebook maybe changed the outcome of the American election in 2016? English scholars (and social scientists) study that. And how did you even find out about these news? You probably read about it somewhere…English researchers (and social scientists) also study that.
@juillet massively improves every thread she decides to post in, IMO. I feel like I learn things every time 
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It doesn’t seem to me from your posts you understand how PhD programs work. Most places, these days, they are fully funded with tuition waivers and a stipend to cover living expenses. (I am sure there are some fields where this is an exception, but I don’t believe in the STEM, Medieval Studies, etc discussion going on here) This allows those from less affluent backgrounds access. I know professors whose parents didn’t go to college and couldn’t help pay for their graduate education. They lived the American Dream. As Juliette points out, taxing the tuition waivers hurts socioeconomic diversity in graduate programs. It keeps students from less affluent backgrounds out of these programs. Rich kids will still get PhDs at the schools that award them.
Under the current system, if your kid gets accepted into a PhD program, your kid doesn’t have to pay for that degree, at least not in dollars.
This is a huge benefit to the families that don’t qualify for FA for undergraduate education, assuming their kids are interested in getting a PhD and get admitted to a program. It is strictly a merit system at this point in time. If you get in, you get the tuition waiver and stipend.
I hope to goodness I’ve explained this correctly and at least clear enough for you to understand.
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Actually Bem’s research couldn’t be replicated in many cases: https://www.csicop.org/si/show/failure_to_replicate_results_of_bem_parapsychology_experiments_published_by.
Unless, you have a truly random sample with a sufficiently large sample size and high response rate, you often have a case of garbage in and garbage out. Your conclusions can’t be any more reliable than your underlying data sources. Even if it were provably true teens were more sexually active in the 1920s than previously believed, it’s still dubious whether that information is valuable except for playing trivia.
Yes, technical documentation is critical, but any tech writer whose writing sounds like an English novel should be immediately fired.
I’d think the need for more reproducibility calls for MORE funding for PhD students, not less. It is a shame that students now are generally discouraged from reproducing other studies to validate them, but instead MUST embark on something new.
Reminder that this doesn’t just affect future grad students. It’s those of us already in programs that are most screwed. If we leave our program, depending on the field we can be blackballed from other programs.
I already signed my contract for my TA position next semester. Could I break it? Sure, but I might be ending my chances of ever working in academia or of ever getting the PhD that I’ve already poured many years of my life into.
Thanks @OHMomof2 
Sure. I didn’t say that Bem’s work was always perfectly replicated. What I said was that he has been able to repeatedly replicate his results. (I actually incorrectly used the word “reproduce,” which is a different concept. What I meant was “replicate,” .)
And to be clear, I think his science is actually junk.
False, actually! Which also goes to show the importance of teaching social science and the statistics and quantitative methods that go along with it.
Random samples are actually not strictly necessary to understanding human behavior (or the physical or natural world, either). Many of the medical leaps and bounds we have made were not done with random samples, but with what we call convenience samples. For example, the field of modern gynecology was birthed in large part by (unethical) experiments with black female slaves in the 1800s. Much of what we know about disease epidemiology was done with non-random samples. Virtually all of the drugs you take, from aspirin to chemotherapy, were developed with non-random samples. In fact, many early medical experiments completely excluded women, with the explanation that their hormones would interfere with the testing.
“Sufficiently large sample size” and “high response rate” also vary a lot depending on what you’re looking for and what methods you’re using. You’d actually be surprised at how small an N you need to have the power to find really tiny differences between populations, should they exist. (And in fact, having very large samples has an opposite problem - it’s very easy to find very small, very meaningless differences when you have very large samples.)
You want to know how the information is valuable? Every couple of years, some politician gets up and says something like “Teenagers these days are so promiscuous! It’s the reason that sexually transmitted infections and HIV are so widespread these days. Look at the old days [insert any period up to and including the 1970s here] - we didn’t have all of these STIs and HIV, because the kids weren’t having as much sex. This is why we should teach abstinence-only education in schools!”
And then the humanists and social scientists can say “Actually, no, adolescents these days are waiting longer to have sex for the first time, and they actually have fewer sexual partners than teenagers in previous decades. The increase in sexually transmitted infections is due to us being able to test for and identify those infections. [Insert the history of medical testing for STIs here.]” ← Some historian did that.
“Also, we did lots of studies and abstinence-only education actually doesn’t really work at all - kids only delay sex by about 6 additional months, and they’re less likely to use condoms or birth control when they do initiate.” ← Some sociologists and psychologists did that.
(Which is taken from actual debates on sexuality education in schools that actually happen every couple of years. This was a research area of mine.)
The problem here is that you are equating “literature” with “novel.” Literature is a single body of written works, and scholars in English literature study much, much, much more than novels. For example, the only novel I mentioned in the post I wrote above, where I mentioned works that changed the world, was Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Reproducibility requires that other researchers be able to reproduce your results.
For binomial distributions, which is probably the most typical case in measuring percentage of population does X, 100 is a reasonable starting point for a sample size to produce an estimate. For testing for differences between populations, you would want an even larger sample for most applications.
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That’s not a problem unless the researcher is an idiot and doesn’t understand the importance of effect sizes for their applications.
People did lots of crazy or at least very primitive stuff in the 1800s, and some of our early discoveries were basically dumb luck. I’m not sure why anyone would think that’s a model of how to conduct research today.
You’re comparing RCTs and surveys. With surveys, you need a random sample of the population of interest.
A tech manual isn’t going to have much in common with the Feminine Mystique or Mein Kampf either …
But what argument is there that income shouldn’t be taxed? Several people have referred to the money as income. Income gets taxes.
Barter situations are taxed/taxable. You fix my car, I’ll tutor your child. Taxable to both as income, deductible by neither because it is a personal expense. The school is saying you teach/do research/work for the school, and we’ll give you tuition. If the school paid the grad student the salary and then charged them the tuition, the salary would be taxed, and the tuition wouldn’t be deductible unless there was another tax provision to make it deductible (or a credit). If the tuition is $20k, that’s the salary.