>Even campaign finance laws reflect this. Suppose you're an airline and you write off the costs of a candidate's tickets when he flies around the country campaigning. The value of those tickets must be recognized as a campaign contribution.

Ah, but you don't write off the costs of airplane tickets for the cabin staff, which is what would really fix the analogy here. Grad-students are serving as employees and trainees of their advisors. In industry, you would never, ever ask a trainee to pay twice their wages in "training costs" to their employer. They'd leave, and never look back.

I agree with people in the other thread that we really should find a way to end the legal fiction that PhD students with "tuition waivers" are being charged or paying any tuition at all. They're something between interns and entry-level employees, except of course that charging interns for the internship remains illegal.

Perhaps there are really two separate relationships between the school and the grad student, and we're confusing everything by conflating them. On one hand they're acting as researchers and TAs, and being paid (a pittance) for that. On the other hand, they're students buying educational services from the school, which they're putatively paying for out of their compensation package.

Well, if we want to fix that, we could rework our degree system to function like the European one. Over there, a Master's is a mixture of coursework (and research for more ambitious students), while a PhD requires a Master's to enter and has the legal classification of an entry-level job, with work duties but few to no courses.