<story><title>The destruction of graduate education in the United States</title><url>https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3542</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>theptip</author><text>I found this article to be quite hysterical (and I follow and enjoy Aaronson&amp;#x27;s blog). It fails to present (or even consider) that there is a reasonable justification for these tax code changes, and instead leaps to &amp;quot;Trump and the Republicans must be evil and are out to crush all liberal edifices&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;An article recently posted here on HN gives a more nuanced explanation for what&amp;#x27;s going on: &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15807842&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&amp;#x2F;item?id=15807842&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;TL;DR, the tuition fee deferral scheme that universities currently use is a grant-money laundering scheme. It&amp;#x27;s used to take federal grant money that comes with strings attached (e.g. can only be spent on certain things like paying salaries for grad students, or research costs) and launder it into money that can be spent on whatever the university wants (e.g. building new campuses or paying for nice desks for administrators). It&amp;#x27;s probably not unreasonable for the federal government to try to close this loophole.&lt;p&gt;The issue is that students are caught in the crossfire here, and I&amp;#x27;m not sure that the incentives are there for universities to protect them fully.&lt;p&gt;But to be clear, the universities could just stop billing the government false grad student salaries, and then grad students&amp;#x27; take home pay and tax exposure would remain unchanged, and there would be no crisis. The problem is that then universities would have to find a new money laundering scheme, or would have to make structural changes to their budgets that they would prefer not to make.</text></comment>
<story><title>The destruction of graduate education in the United States</title><url>https://www.scottaaronson.com/blog/?p=3542</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>jknoepfler</author><text>The systematic erosion of public education in the United States doesn&amp;#x27;t serve anyone in the United States&amp;#x27; long term interests, except maybe the religious right (who don&amp;#x27;t matter that much in the federal government). It just doesn&amp;#x27;t serve monied interests. It doesn&amp;#x27;t help big oil, it doesn&amp;#x27;t help big pharma, it doesn&amp;#x27;t help the legal or medical professions, it doesn&amp;#x27;t help finance, or insurance, or banking. So I&amp;#x27;m a little puzzled. Who does it benefit?&lt;p&gt;I share the author&amp;#x27;s bewilderment in the face of the realization that this is, in fact, terrible for universities, and (seemingly, given what we know) not just weird news spin-doctoring or scare mongering:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;&amp;quot;Given the existential risk to American higher education, why didn’t I blog about this earlier? ... It’s simply that I didn’t believe it—even given all the other stuff that could “never happen in the US,” until it happened this past year... Surely even the House Republicans would realize they’d screwed up this time, and would take out this crazy provision before the full bill was voted on?  Or surely there’s some workaround that makes the whole thing less awful than it sounds?  There has to be … right?&amp;quot;&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m also confused. I decided that I didn&amp;#x27;t have the right kind of information to understand what was happening in the Federal government a long time ago, and I still think that, but I find this whole situation very puzzling, because it doesn&amp;#x27;t make much sense given how I think the world works (which is, of course, a deeply flawed and nearly useless model of the real world).</text></comment>