2) "creative accounting" and "skim more money" are pretty ridiculous ways to describe how research grants work. It's a system like any other. Disrupting it for no particular reason is anything but conservative.
For 2), "creative accounting" is exactly what it is. Research grants are for research. The money can be spent on various things, which include salaries of researchers, the cost of lab equipment and supplies, and there's even a special category for "overhead", which is the money that goes straight to the mother institution to keep the lights on. The trick is to allocate $55k per grad student in the grant, and instantly take $20k from it to pay for the "tuition". In practice, the science labs, and the grad students are bringing income to the universities through the grants they get, and the universities additionally charge them for the privilege to do so.
It's because the tax bill needed to pass through reconciliation (which has special rules related to the deficit). Generating artificial savings on paper allowed the GOP to increase the size of the tax cut on paper.
- A publicly searchable database, showing projects that derive as a result of public grants.
- Non-profit universities disclose administrative and faculty salaries like the UC and other states systems do, even if anonymized.
- Provide an explanation of why the size of their student bodies have stayed the same over the years while their endowments and operating income have ballooned, assuming their mission is to provide education as a public good [2].
[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2015/09/harv...
Aren't you supposed to be taxed on the value of a good/service/gift received even if it was given to you for free? What is the "true value" of tuition?
I don't think waiving tuition will work, assuming tuition is taxed like most other things.
Also, what was the point of the tax bill if you expect everyone to just rearrange the deck chairs so they don't have to pay any new taxes?
If they keep charging everyone else and make education free for employees, the tuition they would have paid becomes taxable income.
Contrariwise if no one is really paying these tens of thousands of dollars in tuition, with the university just eating the "tuition bill" in the case of e.g. an English grad student, then why should a grantor have to pay that tuition bill for a microbiologist grad student on top of her stipend?
I get that this sucks for people caught up in it but I don't see a lot of stepping back and thinking about what makes sense.
So why should it be any different for a university as the employer? This is just a loophole being closed. Just get rid of the damned "dissertation credits" and problem solved.
Is this really true though? Some universities charge in-state and out-of-state students different tuition rates, but the in-state students aren't liable for paying taxes on the difference between the tuition rates. It seems like those are just different degrees of the same thing so the same rules should apply. Perhaps the distinction is that the schools who differentiate between in-state and out-of-state students are state schools and thus play by slightly different rules?
If this happens, this will be a huge failure on their institution part. The only reason their tax bill might be affected is due to creative accounting practices of universities, who use the tuition waiver as a way to skim more money from the grants. Universities will just start offering education for free instead of waiving the tuition, and will find a new accounting trick to take money from federal science grants in "overhead".