- Police arrested nine protestors
outside Speaker Paul Ryan's Washington office this week.
Protesters voicing display over tax changes
for graduate students.
Tonight we take a closer look at the changes in the House tax
bill that would make tuition waivers taxable income.
According to the American Council on Education,
about 145,000 U.S.
graduate students receive tuition waivers.
Michael Bellecourt is a UW-Madison graduate student
who represents the Teaching Assistants' union.
Michael, thanks very much for being here.
- Thank you for having me.
- As you know, the House version has to be squared
in conference committee with the Senate bill,
which does not include this provision,
but what would this tax change mean to students like yourself?
- The situation is really different for every graduate
student, so I don't want to go in with one number and say every
grad here at Madison will pay this much more.
But for a very sizable chunk of grad students here at
UW-Madison, their tax burden could go up by several thousand
dollars if this bill passes with the House's language.
- Would those grads students be able to pay that?
- Many of them would have to take out additional loans just
to pay their taxes.
- And so what's been the reaction on this campus and
others to this proposed tax change?
- Amongst grad students there's a lot of disbelief,
a lot of fear and a lot of disgust
about this proposed change.
And it's really motivated a lot of grad students to speak out.
- You are a biochemistry Ph.D. candidate.
What is the value of your tuition waiver?
- My tuition as a senior graduate student
is actually very low.
So I have a very low burden, according to this language.
But incoming biochemistry graduate students,
they have a much tuition because they're still taking classes.
And these are some of those students that will have that
additional several thousand dollars of taxes if the House
version of the bill.
- So for those younger, incoming grad students,
what is tuition for grad school that they get waived
potentially?
- The value of the tuition, the actually monetary value
is around $2500.
Most of us don't even know that
because we don't ever see our tuition.
It's just money that's being handed
from one part of the university to the other.
So the fact that they want to tax us on that money that we
never even really see is kind of amazing.
A lot of grad students don't even know what their tuition is.
- You said it was $2500. Per semester?
- That's per year. It is an approximation.
I don't have the exact numbers on me because these numbers
are just kind of mysterious to the grad student.
It's buried on the UW-Madison website.
- Do you have any idea how many UW-Madison students are granted
this tuition waiver?
- All UW-Madison grad students have a tuition waiver.
Yes.
- Would that be the case
where there are Ph.D. programs elsewhere?
- Most universities across the nation waive tuition for their
grad students.
I would even venture to say it may be all universities.
- I heard one critic of the tax change say it would mean only
the wealthy could afford graduate students.
How real is that in your mind?
- We have so little money at the end of month
because we don't make a lot.
Our stipends are very low.
If we had to throw additional money at taxes,
we would have nothing.
We would have to take out loans or we would have to have
a wealthy source funding our graduate student career.
- Would that be an impact on research?
- Absolutely. - How?
- Taxing tuition would
cause people to stay away from grad school.
We would have so many fewer graduate students.
And the graduate students are really the people who are doing
research.
We have all these really intelligent professors and
they're instrumental to the process,
but their role in research is advising others.
They're telling others what to do, how to do the experiments,
what to research.
And others are doing it for them.
Whether that's a graduate student or a post doc,
you would scare away grad students,
you will have no one doing that research
and it'll all just-- the system will collapse.
- Michael Bellecourt, thanks very much.
- Thank you.