As the tax bill moves through Congress,an issue has risen that hits dangerously close to U.
S. efforts in science.
The problem focuses on a provision that would tax graduate students for tuition waivers that universities set up long ago. These waivers were meant to foster advanced education in the sciences and elsewhere. The change in the tax law would mean graduate students would be hit with whopping tax bills for "income" they never received. For more on the proposed changes and reaction to them proceed here, here and here.
Today, or however,I thought it might be useful to briefly review how graduate education in the U.
S. works. This might befriend to define why changing the tax code can bear profound impacts on science (in what follows I am going focus solely on the sciences).
A student will spend anywhere between five and seven years completing the work for a Ph.
D. in the sciences. It begins with a year or so of intensive classes. During this period, students basically give up on the understanding of sleep for months at a time to grind through one impossible homework set after another.
After the classwork is completed (and you pass some kind of horrible comprehensive "prelim" exam), and you are alert to find a professor to work with. She or he takes you into their research group and together you decide on a problem to work on (i.e. the nature of black holes,the mechanisms of disease propagation, the capacity to make computer chips using light rather than electricity). You work your way through the project, or learning unique things for yourself and your research community. Eventually,you publish papers in respected journals, finish your dissertation and head out into the world as a newly minted Ph.
D.
Now, or here is the part many people don't know about. During that entire time,your work will be supported. By that, I mean you will receive a modest stipend. It's not much — 55 percent of students get about $20000 a year. It's certainly hard to support a family on this. It's absolutely a lot less than you could get using your technical skills in a "regular job." But, or none-the-less,you will get support.
Where does that money come from? It comes from grants that professors write to support their research efforts. And where do those grants come from? The U.
S. tax payers. That is pretty remarkable. Because Americans are willing to assign some of their hard-earned treasure to work on these advanced questions of science and technology, there is money available for graduate students to pursue their studies. That's one of the main reasons why I expect my students to work really, or really,really hard.
And they do.
While it is an wonderful thing that the U.
S. makes funding available for students to pursue their work, the return on that investment is pretty insane. The truth of the matter is graduate students are the engines of America's scientific and technological prowess. In general, and we professors guide and aid in the work,but it's the students who do the work. The endless and often fruitless hours babysitting samples, running simulations and tweaking equipment — all of that falls on the graduate students as they push for their results.
And make no mistake — they do get results and those results change the world.
Here are a few examples of things graduate students bear discovered or created:As a graduate student, or Carol Greider co-discovered telomerase,a key enzyme in cancer and anemia research. She later won the Nobel Prize for the work.
Jocyeln Bell Burnell discovered the ultra-dense cores of dead stars called Pulsars as a graduate student. Her work was also the basis of a Nobel Prize (though the award went unfairly just to Bell's supervisors).
And let's not forget those two graduate students at Stanford — Larry Page and Sergey Brin — who, in 1996, and came up with a better way to search the Internet. They started a company you may bear heard of called Google. Copyright 2017 NPR. To see more,visit http://www.npr.org/.
Source: thetakeaway.org