The following article by Tanya Basu was posted on the Daily Beast website November 19, 2017:
Emily Slonecker is a second year PhD student student at the University of California, Irvine studying developmental cognitive research. She currently earns about $19,000 per year after taxes. The new tax plan, however, would drop her income from her work at the lab to about $16,000 a year in one of the most expensive places to live in America, or about $1300 a month. With her fixed monthly expenses ringing in at $1680, however, Slonecker is nowhere close to making the money she needs to live—and that doesn’t even begin to cover the loans she’s accumulated from her undergraduate years. “But that’s a whole other can of worms,” she brushed off. “If this thing passes and the school is unable to find a loophole, I will have to walk away from the path I have dreamed about my entire life, as will many students. I don’t know anyone who can survive on a negative net income for six years.”
Slonecker’s dire situation worries of her living costs might be the classic story of the poor graduate student: making ends meet with a patchwork of teaching jobs, grants, and, most importantly, scholarships waiving tuition that make spending long hours in the lab a fair tradeoff.
Beyond making graduate education impossible for the foreseeable future should it pass, the new tax bill has the potential to stymie fundamental science research in labs.
Here’s how. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that passed the House by 227 Republican votes on Thursday repeals Section 1204 of the new bill, which, under the current tax code, offered an exemption for “Interest Payment on Qualified Education Loans, Tuition & Related Expenses, Interest on United States Savings Bond, Qualified Tuition Reduction, and Employer-Provided Education Assistance.”
In plain English, that means that tuition waivers were not considered taxable income and were therefore exempt. The proposed new tax code, however, views that waiver as taxable income.
Which is a big deal. On the lower end of the potential taxable scale are graduate students at public universities who claim addresses in-state, with a tuition bill that’s close to $50,000; on the higher end is the double whammy of being an international student at a private university, which can lead to bills inching close to $100,000. In other words, almost every graduate student receiving a tuition waver would be actually paying to earn their degree.
Surya Aggarwal is the chair of the advocacy board of the National Association of Graduate-Professional Students (NAGPS) and spent Friday morning on the Hill, speaking to lobby groups and representatives on the fence about the bill about the devastating effects of tacking on taxes on tuition wavers. Aggarwal is a PhD student in biology at Carnegie Mellon University and studies why streptococcus pneumonia can be drug resistant, eventually causing lung infection.
View the post here.