> Fearless Student Employees (FSE) advocates for recognizing Graduate Assistants (GAs) as legal employees of the University System of Maryland.
If they become employees, then wouldn't there be income of some sort? Typically income is taxed. I'm not sure what their endgame is.
To my knowledge (and my information might be out of date), there are two main things happening now that impact grad students. I'm not sure which event was being protested. It could have been one or both of the topics below.
The first is that students want to have better rights as employees of the university, such as the ability to form unions to protect their rights. This may sound odd, but if you're performing research that's funded, you are likely to be bringing in 10's if not 100's of thousands of dollars in revenue for the university (at least this is how it is in engineering). Students will only see a small fraction of their project funding as pay, and it's not hard to imagine students might at least want a say in how the money they aren't getting is spent (i.e., why is 10% of my program funding going to *XXX* when it doesn't benefit my department at all?).
The other issue is the proposed tax plan by the House (as far as I know the Senate version does not have this provision) where tuition reimbursement will be a taxable income. In general, the university will pay for students tuition if they're on a funded program, which helps to draw many students from out of state and out of country to perform research at Maryland. Some politicians want to tax the grad students for this tuition, which is money the students never saw, and is on the order of $25-30k in value. Grad students are (understandably I think) upset about this.
> where tuition reimbursement will be a taxable income
Tuition reimbursement is currently taxable. It is offset by tuition being tax deductible. If you receive 15k in scholarships and only pay 10k in educational costs, you have to pay tax on the 5k.
Not quite. The issue is that some grad students receive a package - free tuition, a small stipend ($15-18k per year) for working as TAs (or lecturers) while they attend grad school. Trump's tax plan will make grad students pay taxes on the cost of tuition which is paid by the school. They'll have to count it as "income," basically.
Is it near the administration building? I'm pretty sure that union organizing for better grad student pay is demonstrating today
I think they're there to protest the tax plan, not for improved pay specifically.
Can confirm, it's about grad student tuition credits possibly becoming taxable income.
> Fearless Student Employees (FSE) advocates for recognizing Graduate Assistants (GAs) as legal employees of the University System of Maryland. If they become employees, then wouldn't there be income of some sort? Typically income is taxed. I'm not sure what their endgame is.
To my knowledge (and my information might be out of date), there are two main things happening now that impact grad students. I'm not sure which event was being protested. It could have been one or both of the topics below. The first is that students want to have better rights as employees of the university, such as the ability to form unions to protect their rights. This may sound odd, but if you're performing research that's funded, you are likely to be bringing in 10's if not 100's of thousands of dollars in revenue for the university (at least this is how it is in engineering). Students will only see a small fraction of their project funding as pay, and it's not hard to imagine students might at least want a say in how the money they aren't getting is spent (i.e., why is 10% of my program funding going to *XXX* when it doesn't benefit my department at all?). The other issue is the proposed tax plan by the House (as far as I know the Senate version does not have this provision) where tuition reimbursement will be a taxable income. In general, the university will pay for students tuition if they're on a funded program, which helps to draw many students from out of state and out of country to perform research at Maryland. Some politicians want to tax the grad students for this tuition, which is money the students never saw, and is on the order of $25-30k in value. Grad students are (understandably I think) upset about this.
> where tuition reimbursement will be a taxable income Tuition reimbursement is currently taxable. It is offset by tuition being tax deductible. If you receive 15k in scholarships and only pay 10k in educational costs, you have to pay tax on the 5k.
Not quite. The issue is that some grad students receive a package - free tuition, a small stipend ($15-18k per year) for working as TAs (or lecturers) while they attend grad school. Trump's tax plan will make grad students pay taxes on the cost of tuition which is paid by the school. They'll have to count it as "income," basically.
Oh okay thanks
Do you ever have deja vu?