It’s Time For Left-Wing Grad Students To Pay Their Fair Share Of Taxes

We are the 99%. More precisely, I’m a member of the 99.4% of Americans not currently enrolled in graduate school, which means that the government taxes my income. Graduate students, many of whom supported the Occupy Wall Street protests which insisted that wage-earners who already surrendered 39.6% of their annual income to the federal government while half of the country paid nothing weren’t contributing their “fair share,” pay virtually no income tax. It’s time for left-wing graduate students to put their money where their mouths are and pay their fair share.

While universities pay graduate students on average a stipend of around $25,000 each academic year to assist in teaching classes, assisting in research, or grading assignments, the majority of graduate student income comes in the form of tuition credits worth upwards of $30,000 or more. A loophole in the tax code allows students to ignore tuition credits and therefore the majority of their income when calculating their tax liability. The median household income in the United States is $59,000—around the same amount as the effective graduate student income. Under the current tax regime, the government confiscates the wealth of that American, who works in the productive economy for an average of 47 hours per week to support his family, to fund the activism of adult Gender and Sexuality Studies students.

Increasing political activism and academic frivolity has eroded campus life since the 1960s. University of Chicago philosopher Allan Bloom described the crisis of higher education in his classic 1987 work, The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students, and the campus has only furthered decayed in the intervening decades. Pre-eminent literary critic and Yale professor Harold Bloom assailed politicized pseudo-disciplines of the “Such-And-Such Studies” variety as the School of Resentment, which he observed threatens the not only academic rigor but liberal education itself. Harold need look for proof no further than his own campus, where this past spring a group of graduate students squandered weeks of potential scholarship by engaging in a “symbolic” hunger strike that entailed eating when hungry to agitate for the right to unionize not by school, which absurdly they already possessed, but more specifically by academic department.

Ironically, as academic standards have declined, university costs have risen dramatically. According to a U.S. News survey, average tuition and fees at national universities have increased by 157-237% over the last two decades, largely due to incentives, subsidies, and student loans guaranteed by the federal government. Universities have also hired a spate of pointless bureaucrats such as deans, associate deans, and assistant deans to regulate euphemistic drivel like “diversity” and “inclusion.”

Despite the high price tag of both graduate and undergraduate education, 90% of Millennial high school graduates attend college, up from just 59.9% in 1990. Coincidentally, despite the massive jump in university enrollment, only 59.6% will graduate within six years, in keeping with historical averages. For those who do make it through their baccalaureate and to pursue a doctorate, dismal job prospects frequently leave them unemployed and drowning in debt with their career-defining twenties in the rearview mirror and little to show for it.

The irony that left-of-Lenin graduate students who regularly agitate for higher taxation now fume that they may have to pay taxes themselves is irresistibly delightful. On Wednesday, grad students across the country staged a “walkout” to protest the proposed tax reform plan, apparently unaware that “walkouts” only work if the protesters provide a service that will be missed if they cease to perform it. But schadenfreude aside, the GOP proposal stands to benefit graduate students by correcting a broken system of perverse incentives that leaves 91.75% of doctorate recipients without a tenure track job after graduation.

If the tax reform plan passes into law, universities will doubtless alter their accounting to maintain the regular flow of lucrative customers. After all, somebody has to teach, grade, and conduct research for pitiful wages while tenured professors write books. But the reform will go a long way toward keeping everybody honest—an indispensable foundation for academic inquiry.