Ugliest part of the Republican tax plan: What if universities were forced to calculate the value of a graduate education?

Here’s a WIRED article on the latest Republican tax plan:

the devastating impact the GOP’s recently unveiled tax-reform plan could have on the university’s PhD candidates. Buried in that plan is a proposed repeal that would cause graduate students’ tuition waivers to be counted as income—making them subject to taxes.

The annual stipend for a PhD student in Carnegie Mellon’s school of computer science is about $32,400. The university covers the student’s $43,000 tuition, in exchange for the research she [your typical CS grad student is a woman, as it happens!] conducts and the courses she teaches. Under current law, the government taxes only a student’s stipend; the waived tuition is not taken into account. But under the GOP bill, her annual taxable income would rise from $32,400 to $76,234. Even factoring in new deductions also included in the proposal, the CMU document estimates her taxes would amount to $10,209 per year—nearly four times the amount under current law. That would slash her net annual stipend by 25 percent, from $29,566 to $22,191.

Many academics fear the tax burden would waylay efforts to increase social and intellectual diversity at their institutions. “You have to advocate for folks who are coming down the pipeline,” says UCLA neuroscientist Astra Bryant. She says that’s especially true of women and underrepresented minorities. “I mentor two underprivileged undergraduate women, and my concern for them is that an increased tax burden would make it financially impossible for them to afford to pursue a PhD.” [but if the typical STEM grad student is a woman, as suggested above, why worry specifically about women?]

The idea is that the IRS will assess tax based on the university’s absurd fiction that, absent a “stipend,” grad students would have coughed up the rack rate $43,000 per year. Schools could address this by cutting the official (fictitious) tuition price for graduate school (as distinct from professional school, such as med school or law school) to something close to the actual cost or perhaps to zero. If the IRS were to challenge the new number that’s where it gets potentially interesting. If we accept the principle that people should pay tax on value that they receive in exchange for employment then we must calculate the value received by spending six years as an English or Physics grad student. But a lot of university majors end up reducing the student’s lifetime income and therefore students would actually be entitled to a deduction as a result of their waived tuition? Imagine if Yale had to show just how much damage they were doing to a young person’s earning potential by keeping him or her in a theater program?

[See IRS Publication 15-B and the “General valuation rule” should be applicable: “The fair market value (FMV) of a fringe benefit is the amount an employee would have to pay a third party in an arm’s-length transaction to buy or lease the benefit. Determine this amount on the basis of all the facts and circumstances. Neither the amount the employee considers to be the value of the fringe benefit nor the cost you incur to provide the benefit determines its FMV.” Nobody can argue that a typical physics grad student would pay $250,000 in tuition to get a Ph.D. So the fair market value, and therefore the IRS fringe benefit value, will be some lower (potentially negative) number.]

Related:

• my article on how academic science tends to reduce a person’s income and therefore young people may go into other fields for economic reasons