The GOP tax bill could be a disaster for Ph.D. students
Add graduate students to the list of potential “losers” in the House Republicans’ tax overhaul plan.
The bill, in its current form, eliminates or consolidates tax credits used by both graduate and undergraduate students — but those pursuing master’s degrees and PhDs will get hit the hardest by the proposed changes.
One of the most glaring: the possible end of nontaxable tuition waivers for grad students who work as teaching or research assistants. Approximately 145,000 graduate students could be affected by this change, about 60 percent of them from STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields, according a 2011 to 2012 survey by the Department of Education, the most recent data available. It’s hard to say precisely the tax hike for each person, and tuition varies per institution, but, experts suggest students could owe around an additional $2,000 per year or more — which could add up for grad and PhD students who usually take multiple years to complete their studies.
What are tuition waivers exactly?
If you’re a PhD student right now who works in your university’s lab, you’ll get paid a stipend for that job — but not much. The average annual salary for graduate research assistant, for example, is less than $30,000, according to Glassdoor. There’s also tuition to pay to the institution where you’re getting that PhD.
But since you’re cleaning petri dishes, the university waives that tuition. And based on the qualified-tuition-reduction provision in the tax code, the waived tuition isn’t currently taxed as income.
But the new GOP plan would change that, Steven Bloom of the American Council on Education explained. That tuition, as he put it, “would be taxable income to the graduate student.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/the-gop-tax-bill-could-be-a-disaster-for-phd-students/ar-AAuy95y?li=BBnbfcN&ocid=edgsp
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