Academic Challenges: The GOP Tax Plans

From the student level to tenured faculty, academia poses a vast set of challenges. Every two weeks, Al-Diwan brings you a collection of articles and perspectives that touch upon one problem within academia. This week's focus is on the GOP Tax Plans.

NO to the #GradTax
By Hank Reichman (Academe Blog)

In a call to faculty members across university campuses, the American Association of University Professors asked for support in opposing tax bills passed by the Senate and House of Representatives in the recent past. On November 29, graduate students organized multiple public demonstrations expressing their anger with the tax plans, and in a press release, organizers explained exactly how they would be impacted by their proposed pieces of legislation.

Tax Reform and Higher Education: What is at Stake
By The American Council on Education 

The American Council on Education outlined some of the differences between the Senate and House tax bills. They also paid close attention to the portions of the tax plans that would play a role in the future of higher education, such as taxes on endowments, tuition waivers, and loan financing.
 

The GOP tax bill could be a disaster for PhD students
By Jen Kirby (Vox)

Just as attention is given to the immediate impact that the GOP tax plan could have on the pockets of graduate students, there must also be a focus on the ripple effect within higher education more broadly. According to Dr. Claus Wilke, a faculty member at the University of Texas-Austin, “It would really upend the entire American PhD system.”

Universities are also to blame for the GOP’s ‘grad student tax’
By Sarah Arveson (Washington Post)

Taking a different angle to the GOP tax plan discussion, Sarah Arveson, a PhD student at Yale University, looks at the university systems that not only give the opportunity to Congress to have such a role in changing graduate students’ taxable income, but also how universities have used tuition to maintain the hierarchy of academia.

GOP tax plan rattles higher education
By Benjamin Wermund (Politico)

With higher education often labeled as “elitist,” college administrators and lobbyists are faced with the challenge to show how the new tax plans will negatively impact the work schools are doing to combat factors that make higher education in accessible and lead to their “elite” classification.
 

University Graduate Students Walk Out to Protest Tax Plan That Hurts Them
By Emily Sullivan and Chris Arnold (National Public Radio)

Graduate students, who on November 29 staged a “walkout” to voice their disagreement and anger over the GOP tax bill, contest the idea that pursing a graduate degree allows them to live a life of luxury. For many students Emily Sullivan and Chris Arnold talked to, their current stipends are barely enough to survive on, and the new tax plan would be an additional stressor as they head towards an awful job market.
 

Why higher education hates the new tax bills
By Stef W. Kight (Axios)

Stef Kight outlines the facts surrounding higher education in relation to specific portions of the GOP House tax plan. Kight also prefaces this article by noting a significant shift in public perception towards higher education; what was once a site of bipartisan support, higher education has since become a partisan issue.