Graduate Students and House Tax Bill

By Martha Dunkelberger, Ph.D. CCC-SLP, University of Houston 
The current House Tax Bill includes increases in taxes on graduate students by more than 200%. This is because the bill as it stands now will tax the tuition waivers that graduate students are awarded as part of their employment package. In most cases, those tuition waivers are roughly double or higher value as the stipend that they already pay taxes on. In other words, they're going to get $100 in a paycheck, but pay taxes on $300.

If you're a speech-language pathologist or audiologist, that's going to affect our profession drastically since there's already a shortage of PhD level people in our fields. Academic programs will suffer first, but the practice areas will follow shortly thereafter with more severe shortages of well-qualified staff.

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/14/563879136/house-gop-tax-plan-would-hit-grad-students-with-massive-tax-hike?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnews&utm_content=2042