Take Action On Grad Student Tuition Waivers

This post is not one where I am going to analyze politics or riff on pop culture, no sir. I know most of my readers are academics or former academics, and so y'all know that the new tax bill would tax graduate student tuition waivers. This would have prevented most of us, including yours truly, from going to grad school. I know that they are whipping votes for this tax bill in the House next week, and I think we need to flood our representatives with letters and calls about this. I know my rep in New Jersey has my back, so I wrote the representative for the district where I went to grad school, who happens to be a Republican. I will share that letter below. However, I also plan on contacting my alma mater to demand they get off their asses and lobby said rep to do the right thing by his district. I recommend that the rest of you do the same. Kvetching about it on social media alone doesn't solve a damn thing.

Anyway, here's the letter:

I am a proud graduate of the University of Illinois, where I earned my PhD in history. My six years in Champaign-Urbana were some of the best and most fruitful of my life. My graduate degree allowed me to become a university professor and a now teacher at a private high school. The knowledge I learned at Illinois is something that makes in impact on young people every day I go into the classroom, and it is one of the things that I am most grateful for.

It is thus with great trepidation and sadness that I have learned that the current tax overhaul proposal in Congress would start taxing tuition waivers granted by universities to graduate students. Without my tuition waiver there is no way that I would have been able to complete my studies. During my graduate education I worked as a teaching assistant, earning less than $20,000 a year and barely scraping by. Having to pay taxes on a much larger amount of money than I was actually earning would have ended my graduate career.

There are literally thousands of graduate students at the University of Illinois in this situation. The U of I, as I am sure you are aware, is one of the biggest economic assets that the 13^th district possesses. It draws in people from around the country and around the world, many who fall in love with central Illinois and become great assets to its economy and communities. The so-called “Silicon Prairie” would not exist without a fresh group of graduate students in the computer sciences.

What does the government actually gain by taxing poor graduate students? The revenue will be slight, but the negative impact will be tremendous. It is also morally outrageous for a tax plan to do this to graduate students while simultaneously making it so wealthy children can inherit more of their parents’ money or for massive corporations to pay the same tax rate that I, the teacher and spouse of a teacher, will be paying under the new plan.

While it might be a lost cause to persuade you to reject such giveaways to the richest Americans, I at least hope that you can see that the tax on graduate student tuition waivers will have a horrible impact on thousands of your constituents and be extremely bad for the district whose interests you have promised to represent. If you cannot reject the current tax bill wholesale, at least work to eliminate the tax on tuition waivers. If you refuse, I must assume you serve masters other than the people of central Illinois.