Foss: Tax bill erects hurdle for grad students
By Colin Foss Nov. 30, 2017
desk and chairs in classroom. FOTOLIA
The GOP-led House just passed a tax bill that many Republicans are claiming will help middle-class families. But a new nonpartisan report says that, in the long run, middle-class families will take a financial hit while the wealthy reap the benefits.
The bill also helps the wealthy in another way that will harm the middle class: access to higher education.
Buried in the House bill is a provision that will make it prohibitively expensive to pursue master's and doctoral degrees. This provision will tax graduate students on the value of their tuition, even if those students never pay that tuition in the first place. By taxing grad students on money they never receive, this bill is effectively creating a tax on graduate school that only the wealthy could afford.
Grad students rely on financial aid packages, through which universities often waive tuition fees for students who teach or perform research duties. Students do not see any actual money when tuition is waived: The university bills the student and then simultaneously pays that bill. At some public universities, that bill is $10,000. At private universities, it can be up to $50,000. The Republican tax bill will treat these high price tags as if they represented income.
Grad students often receive a stipend for basic living expenses. This is real money that enters their bank accounts and is taxed as income. But these stipends are not much compared to the sticker-price of grad school. In 2011-2012, nearly 55 percent of grad students had adjusted gross incomes of $20,000 or less. For many of these students, the taxes alone on a doctoral education would be impossible to afford unless students were independently wealthy. Even for the happy few who receive the nationwide high of around $30,000 as a stipend, tax-exempt tuition waivers are essential.
For students from middle-class backgrounds, a Ph.D. is already financially trying. Since grad students often carry debt from their previous degrees, they have to find ways to make a living while also being a full-time student. Outside of academia, getting a Ph.D. looks like a luxury. Inside grad programs, where teaching and studying easily translate into 70-hour workweeks, it often feels like underpaid labor.
If you're unmoved by the plight of Ph.D. students, don't forget that they become professors. By restricting grad school to the wealthy, only the wealthy would be teaching at our colleges and universities.
Academia has been called a home for the elites, an ivory tower unaware of the challenges facing average Americans. Like all stereotypes, this is both true and false depending on where and how you look. My institution, Austin College in Sherman, Texas, recently admitted its first majority-minority cohort of students. First-generation college students at my college and across the country continue to matriculate but struggle over cultural and social hurdles beyond the more obvious financial concerns. Middle-class students already face major challenges in the transition to college. Why make it more difficult for our best and brightest to go to grad school?
We have a lot of work to do to ensure that students' gender, race, parents' education and socioeconomic background do not influence their access to quality education. The Republican tax bill will make it harder for smart students to succeed. It will make grad school something you must buy your way through.
This bill will make universities, our country's largest and most powerful tool for social and economic equality, more elitist and exclusive.
Foss is a professor in the Department of Classical and Modern Languages at Austin College.