I found this article to be quite hysterical (and I follow and enjoy Aaronson's blog). It fails to present (or even consider) that there is a reasonable justification for these tax code changes, and instead leaps to "Trump and the Republicans must be evil and are out to crush all liberal edifices".

An article recently posted here on HN gives a more nuanced explanation for what's going on: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15807842

TL;DR, the tuition fee deferral scheme that universities currently use is a grant-money laundering scheme. It's used to take federal grant money that comes with strings attached (e.g. can only be spent on certain things like paying salaries for grad students, or research costs) and launder it into money that can be spent on whatever the university wants (e.g. building new campuses or paying for nice desks for administrators). It's probably not unreasonable for the federal government to try to close this loophole.

The issue is that students are caught in the crossfire here, and I'm not sure that the incentives are there for universities to protect them fully.

But to be clear, the universities could just stop billing the government false grad student salaries, and then grad students' take home pay and tax exposure would remain unchanged, and there would be no crisis. The problem is that then universities would have to find a new money laundering scheme, or would have to make structural changes to their budgets that they would prefer not to make.

The systematic erosion of public education in the United States doesn't serve anyone in the United States' long term interests, except maybe the religious right (who don't matter that much in the federal government). It just doesn't serve monied interests. It doesn't help big oil, it doesn't help big pharma, it doesn't help the legal or medical professions, it doesn't help finance, or insurance, or banking. So I'm a little puzzled. Who does it benefit?

I share the author's bewilderment in the face of the realization that this is, in fact, terrible for universities, and (seemingly, given what we know) not just weird news spin-doctoring or scare mongering:

"Given the existential risk to American higher education, why didn’t I blog about this earlier? ... It’s simply that I didn’t believe it—even given all the other stuff that could “never happen in the US,” until it happened this past year... Surely even the House Republicans would realize they’d screwed up this time, and would take out this crazy provision before the full bill was voted on? Or surely there’s some workaround that makes the whole thing less awful than it sounds? There has to be … right?"

I'm also confused. I decided that I didn't have the right kind of information to understand what was happening in the Federal government a long time ago, and I still think that, but I find this whole situation very puzzling, because it doesn't make much sense given how I think the world works (which is, of course, a deeply flawed and nearly useless model of the real world).

When some of endowments for many universities are in the millions and Harvard has an endowment of 37.5 billion, I find it hard to have sympathy towards this.

The colleges and universities have become corporations that run on student loans and graduate student slave labor. This has to change, and it will be a painful process no matter what happens.

https://www.usnews.com/education/best-colleges/the-short-lis...

An uneducated society is easy to manipulate — easy to convince that climate change isn't real, that evolution is a conspiracy against religion, that creating a social safety net and investing in public education, health care and modern infrastructure is a bad thing.

I hate to turn social issues into black and white, partisan debates. But anti-intellectualism and the denigration of education is a uniquely right-wing phenomenon in the U.S. It's used often by the Republican party here to criticize "elites" and is employed by a long list of other power-hungry demagogues throughout world history [1].

Isaac Asimov wrote a column in January 1980 in Newsweek that describes this phenomenon in the U.S.:

> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

I encourage everyone to read the full column [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism [2]: https://aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_1980_C...

The version of this bill which passed the Senate last night did not end the tuition tax credit [0]. Additionally, tax cuts do sometimes expire after a few years. For example, this info from Intuit indicates that the tuition tax credit in question expired at the end of 2016 [1].

Editing this upon a close rereading of [1]. I'm not sure if that refers to the same tuition tax credit. Any armchair tax lawyers care to weigh in?

But, I have called my representatives and asked them to make sure that the credit survives reconciliation of the bill between the House and Senate, because I don't think that graduate student pay should be used as a bargaining chip.

[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/11/30/what-...

[1]: https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tips/college-and-education/d...

    > As you’ve probably heard, one of the ways Republicans intend to pay for their tax
    >  giveaway, is to change the tax code so that graduate students will now need to
    > pay taxes on “tuition”—a large sum of money (as much as $50,000/year) that
    > PhD students never actually see, that can easily exceed the stipends they do
    > see, and that’s basically just an accounting trick that serves the internal needs
    > of universities and granting agencies.

If I'm working for a company, the company decides "it is required for you to have X. We will provide it to you as part of your compensation." That X is part of my compensation for working there. I don't see why it shouldn't be taxed. "It will cost me more money" is not an excuse to not be taxed. "The students never get the money" is invalid because colleges have deemed their "X" to be worth 50k.

Let me phrase this situation a different way. Assume I start working for Bloomberg's HF trading group. They want me to live closer to my office and buy my a penthouse apartment half a block down. They pay for it (made the contract, own the building, pay the staff, etc) but it's in my name. It's my apartment. Is that part of my income? Shouldn't I be taxed for this apartment? I never actually see the money! I never actually get to spend the money! It's just something that has to happen for me to be on Bloomberg's HF trading team!

I think that should be taxable. What do you think?

I think that the grad student tax would increase the number of grad students.

If the tax increase goes through, universities will probably respond my significantly increasing "indirects" and decreasing tuition. They could twiddle the numbers so that the university still makes the same average off of every grant, and students take homes don't change at all.

But there would be in important difference: from a PI's perspective, grad students would be relatively cheaper. Paradoxically, taxing tuition may have the net effect of creating more grad student positions (while decreasing the spend on capital investments).

Why wouldn't the obvious solution work? Raise graduate student stipends to cover the tax.

Republicans are anti-science, anti-immigration to the extent they want to curb university research and stop the flow of world's smartest immigrants to USA.

That's the only rational explanation of what's going on.

If that wasn't the intent, the people who created and voted for this bill are the biggest idiots.

cached: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YefHUe...