Soooooo, is the GOP deliberately or ignorantly (or both?) trying to destroy higher education in the USA? Because that’s what this would do. Graduate school, i.e. Masters and Ph.D programs across the board, would suddenly become completely unaffordable. If this goes through, which hopefully it will not, it will be unbelievably frightening to see the drop in graduate program enrollments across the USA.
Originally shared by Ethan Siegel
“Despite earning $23,000/year, you’d pay taxes on $40,520 or $57,914 at a public University, and despite earning $32,500, you’d pay taxes on $81,440 at a private University. For this last figure, this would result in a higher tax rate than anyone else in the nation pays. These numbers represent increases in taxes of $2,628, $6,193, and $10,650, respectively, on these hypothetical graduate students.”
The way that graduate school works for most of the 3 million Americans currently enrolled is that they work as either a teaching or research assistant, get a tuition waiver, and support themselves with a small stipend. Earn $23,000/year, and you pay taxes on $23,000/year. It’s not a lot of money, but it’s fair. The tuition waiver, on the other hand, is money that the University pays directly to itself; it’s money that you never see. At some Universities, the tuition waiver is valued at up to $50,000. And one of the biggest changes to the tax code under the new GOP proposal is that all of a sudden, your tuition waiver would be treated as taxable income. For a 1st-year student at University of Florida, your tax burden would jump from 6.2% to 33.1%; for a student at Princeton University, your tax burden would change from 8.8% to 41.9%. In other words, graduate students would become the most heavily-taxed group of Americans of all.
Is it an intentional part of the GOP tax plan to destroy graduate education? I don’t have the answer to that, but if you have any interest in higher education, you’ll want to know about this for sure.