Seriously American students should consider studying abroad. PhDs is a paid job in many countries. Also graduate and undergrad programs are tuition free, even for Americans in many European countries.
I think a problem is many Americans think they have the top universities in the world, but you forget that is really only the ivy league which most Americans will not be able to attend anyway.
I went to a decent university in the US, before going to the Netherlands instead. I got to say it was much better in the Netherlands for several reasons:
1. Most of my professors shockingly spoke BETTER english than at the US university. WHY? Because in the US there is an abundance of professors/teachers from foreign countries, especially from India and various asian countries. These professors often pronunciations of the english language which is hard for an American or European to understand. Dutch professors in contrast speak very clear english. Yes dutch is the native language, but at Master level all courses are taught in english if you don't speak dutch. For undergrad there are several special schools which do english only teaching.
2. More modern facilities. They had better equipped university library. Newer computers in the computer labs etc.
3. They teach you more about how to think. I felt US university was closer to a high school experience. A lot of hand holding and focused on learning lots of stuff. In the Netherlands it was less workload but harder problems. You spend more time thinking than doing.
4. More time with your professor and less time with student assistants and other non-professionals.
5. Easer to be a student in general. You don't need a car to get around. Dutch cities are very walk and bike friendly, and there is lots of public transportation.
6. More FREEDOM! For young people there seems to be way too many restrictions in the US. Can't drink until 21. Gender separated dormitories etc. I find that in the Netherlands and Europe in general you are treated more as an adult. You live in apartments with other students on campus (or off) and there are nobody going around enforcing lots of stupid rules.
Living, studying, and working abroad are great, I have done all three and am abroad now. Do not get me wrong when I caution:
Accepting foreign residence as U.S. American under the present and proposed tax regime may not be a panacea. We pay taxation on foreign income; and if the tax regime changes to impute an estimated tuition cost, you may be in the same boat as the one you started. For all intents and purposes, the double taxation exemption is useless — especially if you live in a country with a higher nominal cost of living than the U.S.
This is not normal. It is one of two countries to tax its citizens when domiciled abroad. The other is Eritrea.
I’ll be frank: I had only one thing to be excited about in this tax bill, and that was the possibility of rescinding citizenship-based taxation (CBT) and moving to residence-based (RBT), but I think the Senate draft doesn’t include this provision. The rest of the law is garbage as far as I am concerned.
But back to the original point, the U.S. is toast. Get out of there. That’s what I have done in my Fortress Zürich. This is a great place to raise a family and live. Each time I return to the U.S., I cannot help but be bombarded with realizations of its regressive characater and barbarism.
In current state of affairs, US acts a giant vaccine pump for talent which means lot of great academics which were supposed to exist in their native countries now exist in one of US universities. I think the recent number on US contribution to research output of the world was staggering 35% far eclipsing any other countries in the world. If you are looking for great department you don't really have lot of choice. However current political climate is rapidly changing this status quo.
How do you measure research output? If you measure it as papers published per capita (admittedly not a very good metric), several european countries lie above the US. The EU in general also has the highest amount of scientists/researchers per capita.
We tend to be biased against results from outside the major ivy league institutions because ivy league results are reported in the press as "harvard professor finds X" whereas the rest of the world has its findings reported as "researches discover Y", or if they are lucky "scientists from country X discover Y". This leads to the extremely superior branding of the top US universities which everyone can name, while they struggle to name 3 of the best institutions in Europe.
I agree with most of your points but does a European PhD hold the same exact weight as an American PhD, on average? I know that might sound silly, but I'm genuinely curious.
if a PhD student published the exact same quality and quantity of papers but their universities differed then it doesn't matter. For example if you published 3 papers in nature (or in comp sci 3 best paper awards at your competitive conference ) during your PhD nobody cares where you did your PhD.
Prestigious universities matter for PhD students if you "fail" , meaning you were unable to produce significant work worth mentioning. Then you can use your prestige to get a job in industry.
It depends. If you are looking for job in tech industry then it really doesn't matter. However if you looking for faculty position in academia or position as researcher/scientist in industry then your alma mater becomes super important. However even then top univ in Europ that would have same weights American counterpart. The only problem is that there are fewer "top" univ in Europ than in US.
Ther'e s a lot of misinformation floating around this discussion. The school that gave me a tuition waiver was owned by the State of Virginia and doesn't pay taxes. Almost all private US schools are charities and don't pay taxes for education-related activities.
American Universities are for profit corporations and need to be investigated. They have huge endowments and pay admins huge sums.
Yet they crush students with unbelievably high tuition.
We have a student loan crisis, that is mentally destroying millennials.
They refuse to pay grad students a living wage.
They refuse to open up publicly funded research.
They overfund huge sports teams while underfunding much needed scientific research.
Universities may have been a beacon of science before, but now they are a profit-seeking parasite destroying students and true scientific progress.
Endowments:
Harvard - 35 billion
Yale - 25 billion
Stanford - 22 billion
Princeton - 21 billion
MIT - 12 billion
Upenn - 10 billion
Texas A&M - 9 billion
Why do these universities need taxpayer money AND force students to take loans ?!
Let's face it - this is a dubious tactic adopted by schools. The latest leaks show universities stashing money offshore. Just clean up your act - Phds are free labor, don't swallow federal grants for exploiting them
This isn't about dubious tactic at all, if the government thinks its dubious it could simply direct NSF/NIH to disallow amount from being used to pay tuition and lower overhead allowed. You don't even need any legislation for that.
In fact PhD's are merely a collateral damage in ending tution tax exemption which affects all students (and represents a much larger chunk when you account for number of undergrads). It's just that in other cases "per-student" effects are much lower, since either the student has no income or the lack of exemption mere dissuades parents from filling jointly.
So, your logic is that it’s fine to tax tuition waivers as income, because the schools should be paying more? How does that work?
This is a dubious tactic adopted by a sleazy political party to ram a bill through congress by taxing literally everything they can in order to make their other tax cuts look revenue neutral.
I don’t think that’s what the parent post means.
Rather, they advocate slashing the tuition price, because universities are already paid - by the government! - and they get to benefit from a PhD student’s labor.
Actually - Not merely slashing. Money should actually flow, but in the opposite direction.
Exactly. In the natural sciences, PhD students are typically required to register for a 'thesis' course, and their lab is billed for the 'tuition' for this course. The lab is already providing all the instruction and paying for facilities for research through overhead charges. The tuition is in fact a naked money grab by the universities, out of a lab's personnel budget, on top of what's already budgeted for overhead.
If these tuition charges are merely overhead, then universities need to dispense with this accounting fiction and re-negotiate their overhead rates with the granting agency, who may decide they get better value at other institutions.
If tuition is really a charge to cover some services a graduate student directly receives from the university, then the waiver is income to the graduate student and ought to be taxed the same way tuition remission is taxed for other university employees.
>The only thing they get "tax free" is tuition, which they shouldn't be paying because in most cases they aren't even taking any classes.
That's my point. If you swap the $20k in my example to tuition, the economics is exactly the same. They're being charged it either way. The fact that the university is giving it "for free" allows them to pay the grad student that much less. As a result, taxable income vanishes.
That isn’t what happens at all. For all non-shitty programs (1), grad schools waive tuition for students regardless of grant funding. When a student gets a grant, it pays his/her salary, not tuition.
(1) shitty programs make the student pay for everything; these programs are irrelevant to the conversation.
"That’s something Margaret Mary Downey, an elected representative for Berkeley’s graduate student union and a fifth-year PhD student studying social welfare, wants to change."
Wow, 5 years into a welfare PhD. Not exactly quantum chromodynamics, but she is an expert at living off the state. Seems more to me like a bunch of whiny socialist wanting everything free. I'm taxed, as income, for any grad classes my employer pays for. I'd say they are just closing a loophole. It goes both ways.
If you can afford it, I'd still apply. The senate version of the bill doesn't tax tuition waivers, unlike the house version. That means the final bill may not include that provision. Even if it does include that provision, the universities will probably find a way to get around this, I assume. Otherwise, they would face enormous problems paying PhD students enough money to live on.
Also, you may want to apply to some schools outside of the US as well, e.g., Canada, UK, etc.
People forget that you can do graduate programs in english in plenty of non-native english speaking countries. All graduate programs in the Netherlands e.g. are offered in english.
A reason to not forget this is that anglo-saxon countries usually have high tuition fees, while outside the anglo-saxon world you can frequently find tuition free or schools with very low tuition.
It is not like lower tuition means worse quality. I've a master partly both in the US and the Netherlands, and the dutch university was much better. Better facilities, better professors, better designed programs.
Of course top American universities are the best in the world, but once you go below that level, American universities are not necessarily that good. University quality varies much more widely in the US and UK e.g. In Scandinavian countries, the Netherlands, Germany etc, quality will be more even.
Depending on what you are studying, both the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto are great graduate schools to consider. UBC has the added bonus of being fairly inexpensive for grad school.
After getting a graduate degree it is also fairly straightforward to become permanent resident, if that’s important to you.
This is truly abomination in my view. Everyone knows how graduate students live on shoestring budgets and that in itself is non-incentive to take graduate studies. Today US thrives because of its research output and lead in technology. This singular measure can change that. On the top of this, the bill makes religious education more accessible.
"Everyone knows how graduate students live on shoestring budgets"
Actually, people do not know this, because a lot of people have never met grad students. That is one of the reasons Republicans can get away with this: their base has no clue what this is about and will probably not be affected by it.
And the people who are affected by and large won't vote for Trump, so they know they can make this political move to offset the 'cuts' to those who will vote Republican. Very sad.
>Until the tax bill drew national attention to these tuition waivers, many graduate students didn’t spend much time thinking about them. “I knew my tuition was being waived,” says first-year anthropology PhD student Levi Vonk. “I had never thought about the political implications that meant that someday Republicans would try to tax my waived tuition. I just assumed that would never be taxed.”
Unfortunately, with this guy at the helm for the next couple of years, nothing will be sacred.
> Grad students receive free housing, tuition, and other paid expenses out of the tax payers wallets.
Not all schools are public or paid for by the taxpayer.
> Good riddance. Universities have been a bastion of Marxism and Leftism for too long and the tax payer is subsidying this bullshit there.
Here are some other things universities are bastions of: medicine, law, engineering, biology, mathematics. All of which will be dramatically and negatively impacted by this change, so that a few very wealthy people won't be taxed on their massive estates after death. In the place of American universities, other countries will take over as the leaders in these fields - or American students will stop attending in favor of international ones, and then your alleged taxpayer dollars will go to people who aren't from here and have no intention of staying.
But hey, at least those damn liberals will be mad, right?
Just to be clear, the majority of PhD students that are getting free tuition take either a very light courseload, or none. They are paying tuition, but not receiving any classes and in fact likely helping teach several classes.
They also already pay income tax on their stipends, which are used to cover housing and other expenses. Free housing is not a benefit available to the vast majority of PhD students.
I know right? What about these other benefits s/he speaks of? When I was in grad school I had to pay for housing, electricity, internet, meals, and transportation. Still had to work for the Uni 20 hours a week, study 40 hours, and take a contract job of 20 hours a week just to live paycheck to paycheck.
I think a problem is many Americans think they have the top universities in the world, but you forget that is really only the ivy league which most Americans will not be able to attend anyway.
I went to a decent university in the US, before going to the Netherlands instead. I got to say it was much better in the Netherlands for several reasons:
1. Most of my professors shockingly spoke BETTER english than at the US university. WHY? Because in the US there is an abundance of professors/teachers from foreign countries, especially from India and various asian countries. These professors often pronunciations of the english language which is hard for an American or European to understand. Dutch professors in contrast speak very clear english. Yes dutch is the native language, but at Master level all courses are taught in english if you don't speak dutch. For undergrad there are several special schools which do english only teaching.
2. More modern facilities. They had better equipped university library. Newer computers in the computer labs etc.
3. They teach you more about how to think. I felt US university was closer to a high school experience. A lot of hand holding and focused on learning lots of stuff. In the Netherlands it was less workload but harder problems. You spend more time thinking than doing.
4. More time with your professor and less time with student assistants and other non-professionals.
5. Easer to be a student in general. You don't need a car to get around. Dutch cities are very walk and bike friendly, and there is lots of public transportation.
6. More FREEDOM! For young people there seems to be way too many restrictions in the US. Can't drink until 21. Gender separated dormitories etc. I find that in the Netherlands and Europe in general you are treated more as an adult. You live in apartments with other students on campus (or off) and there are nobody going around enforcing lots of stupid rules.