That's the illusion. The colleges charge ridiculously high amounts of tuition but then pay it "themselves" knowing they have a bottomless pit of public funds/endowments to scoop from. The government is for the most part anti-competitive; they choose an arbitrary budget of money to spend, and by law that money must be spent according to how the people down the chain request it. If the University of Fuckall says it has X graduate students, each of whom will need to pay for credits valued (by the university administration) at $Y-thousand dollars a semester, they'll manage to get that money from some mixture of federal and state funds assuming they're accredited. In an open market place, would a 3 credit-hour, 15 week lecture attended by 10 graduate students really require 10*$5000 to support? Unless we're talking about the Ivy League (where it makes no difference because everyone is wealthy), there's no way to justify those prices.
To elaborate on my pharma analogy, when hospitals charge $1000 for an Advil and a talk with the doctor, is that the free-market value? Nope. There is an assumption that most people will have some kind of insurance plan caught in a web of various groups which muddy the true value of the Advil. The $1000 isn't the cost of manufacturing, distribution, and an hour of the doctor's wages. It's simply the maximum rate they can charge at which most people will buy, because the government budget is bottomless. It becomes even more egregious when pharmaceutical companies explicitly buy monopolies for the purpose of raping the tax payer. People like to treat Martin Shkreli as if he was condemning people that needed that anti-parasitic drug to death, but in reality "all he did" was rob the tax payer via various health insurance scams, because the individual co-pay was still a tiny fraction.
I'm happy to talk about the problem of tuition costs. But taxing tuition waivers isn't going to force colleges to change their tuition rates.
At least where I live, the dorms are cheaper than most rent outside of campus (ghetto aside of course). It could mean sacrificing space and amenities, sure. Is that enough to make or break becoming a PhD student? Kinda doubt it.
That's never been my experience, but okay.
In my personal experience at a lower-ranked state college, most PhD students are just BA/BS or MS holders that couldn't find a job, so they continue plugging away with marginal living.
I don't know how many PhDs you've actually talked to, but I feel like this is a misinformed impression. The competition to get into most PhD program is higher than competition for most jobs. Now, the allure of working on research and being paid for it might be more attractive than working at a restaurant or something--but the colleges that are easiest to get into as a PhD aren't offering much in terms of stipends (probably less than $20,000, if not less than $15,000), and that level of income isn't attractive to even the hypothetically laziest PhD student.
The majority of PhD students are looking to open opportunities later in their careers, even if that means taking a position at a lower-ranked university.
Can you prove grad students are happy to pay any share above "$0" in income taxes? Since the general "pay and benefits" even with waivers is around poverty level I doubt Grad Students would consider owing a "fair share". I guess we're both not engaging in the most rational of thoughts at times.
I can't prove it, but I can tell you that I do. Which is why I find your tone condescending. My colleagues and I are happy to pay a fair share. This applies more to me, since between my wife and I we make a good living. We support things like the ACA and access to abortion because we don't mind paying our fair share to do that.
The problem is that taxing tuition waivers isn't a fair share for grad students, which I'll explain below.
HBB has pretty thoroughly assessed the actual nature of the scam of higher ed tuition and fees, but nevertheless, tuition waivers are part of a compensatory package. That the department doesn't first hand you the money to give to the university doesn't change that. I do agree that it's a poor way of generating revenue, in part because of the depression of future PhDs, and the likelihood of reduced tuitions to tax. There's a similar issue with Pigovian taxes.
The problem with this outlook is that what you're calling "privilege" here doesn't translate into actual cash in the bank--it applies to, as you've already said, knowledge/intelligence. Now, grad students certainly are in a privileged position; but privilege comes in various forms, and the GOP tax plan demands that they translate their knowledge back into cash and pay it back to the government.
But the structure of grad study doesn't afford the time for students to do this. It's not a position of financial privilege, which is the only thing that matters when it comes to owing money.
I just notice a general tendency in people to be very pro or anti certain things, as long as it's only applied to others.
I don't want it to only be applied to others, and when I'm making $150,000 per year (wouldn't that be nice) in actual earnings, then I'll be happy to pay more.
You're misinterpreting my criticism of the GOP tax plan as hypocrisy because you think I'm excluding myself despite being privileged. I don't deny being privileged, but privilege doesn't mean I've come into some financial windfall; and since taxation is one particular structural means of assisting those less fortunate, it makes no sense to try and take monies from grad students for money value they didn't receive as money.
I know you understand this, you're just being picky about whom to sympathize with because god forbid you express solidarity with grad students.
