Sela

Yes, in some fields such as math it may be true. There aren't that many grants available for math research, but there is high demand for math teaching in any university. So it makes sense that TAship is the main source of funding. But this doesn't really solve the problem. The tuition should be the same for all students within the same academic unit, and even if they could've find a way to change the internal accounting practices for TAships, as long as there is a mixture of TAship and grant-based assistanships within an academic unit, it wouldn't be practical to change tuition to 1$. And even if it would be technically possible to do this, the IRS might label it as a tax evading maneuver.

The biggest problem with reducing the tuition that usually the university receives funding for their PhD students from external sources. Typically, the adviser gets research grants from various sources (for example the NSF), and this money is used to fund the PhD students among other things. The adviser uses his/her research funds to pay for the student's tuition and stipend, and this way the university receives some of the grant money and use it to maintain the facilities, pay for the staff etc. Without paying for the tuition, the university might not be able to get money from the grant.

I signed up to Grad Cafe just so I can respond to this thread. I'm no longer a PhD student. I finished my studies 4 years ago, so it's not going to impact me directly. But since I was a PhD student living from a stipend not long ago, and I know I wouldn't have made it if I had to pay the extra tax, it feels very close to home for me. First, let me be clear: this is not a speculation. The current draft for HR.1 specifically retracts section 117(b) of the IRS tax code. I've read the draft text myself. It's there in the draft. It is true that a draft can still change, but there are some reasons I'm really not optimistic about this: 1. They have been working on this draft for a long time before they posted it. It's not an early draft. 2. They plan to rush this bill through the house and senate so it would pass before the end of the year. The republicans really feel like they need a "win" right now, and for them passing the tax reform is just the kind of "win" they need. 3. In order to pass this as a reconciliation bill in the senate without getting filibustered, it must not increase the deficit by more than 1.5 trillion dollars. Right now, they need to remove more deductions to get to this target. Which makes it less likely they would change this. 4. And most importantly: PhD students are relatively small and insignificant group. They don't have a strong lobby protecting their interests, and compared to the group trying to push back against cancelling the deductions for state and local taxes, they're last in line. Case in point: check news stories about the tax reform. How many headlines have you seen about this story? And the impact is huge. As someone here mentioned, tuition reduction is qualified if this is a qualified institution, and the graduate student performs teaching or research activities for the educational institution. But this is the situation for most PhD students who receive full funding from the university. I checked the numbers based on the stipend I got, and it looks like if it would pass, it would've reduced my post-tax monthly stipend from 1800$ a month to 1150$ a month. But all is not lost. I'm not writing this to discourage you but to encourage you to take action. Just like someone in the white house twitted not long ago: DO SOMETHING. Call your senator. Post about it in your social network. Create memes. Get other grad students and grad candidate to act. Get more people to be aware of this issue. Don't just assume this would change because someone else is going to take care of this for you. Otherwise, this is going to impact not just your pockets, but also higher ed and research in general.