Why stop with grad students? Let’s tax student athletes too
If there are two things that lead me to spend far too much time on twitter, it’s dysfunctional politics and dysfunctional academia. So when the GOP controlled House recently passed their tax overhaul, which would lead to grad student tuition reimbursements being counted as taxable income, I got a little worked up. Pity my senators’ beleaguered voicemail inboxes.
Under the GOP plan, taxes on grad students will increase by 400%. That’s why Forbes’ science contributors are saying “The GOP Tax Plan Will Destroy Graduate Education”. Words like “disaster”, “bankrupt”, and “freak out” are used to describe what’s happening. It’s hard to overstate the impact of this move. Having fought for decades against government support for public colleges and universities, the party of Trump can now claw back some of the funding that never should have been invested in nerds to begin with. The GOP has made subtext into underlined, bolded, 14 point text: they are at war with higher education.
But why stop with grad students? If we’re gonna dismantle the ivory tower, let’s go for broke. Since science obviously won’t be a viable career much longer, I’m going to try my hand at the autophagic political strategizing that Republicans love: Let’s start taxing athletic scholarships.
There was never a stated reason why graduate tuition reimbursement should be taxed beyond rapacious greed, so I shouldn’t have to justify why student athletes will be taxed as well. Just like for grad students, we’ll take their money because we can.
There are roughly 140,000 grad students out there who receive these reimbursements (coincidentally, they all also applied for that awesome new Assistant Professor job posting at CU Boulder you were hoping for). If we ballpark the average reimbursement at $20,000, that’s $2.8 billion that colleges pay themselves. There are about 177,000 full athletic scholarships and according to scholarshipstats.com, universities doled out $3.3 billion in 2015. Point being: if we add in athletic scholarships, we’ll more than double the tax haul. Since these kids just got bumped up an income bracket (congrats), we can assume a 15-25% tax rate, which will bring Uncle Sam about $1 billion. That’s right, for the low cost of dismantling higher education, we can reduce the deficit by less than 0.2%.
Grad students tend to be low- or middle-income, and most make less than $20,000 i.e. perfect candidates for a tax raise. Student athletes are much the same, but are also disproportionately minorities. Are you onboard yet, Mr. President?
