Graduate (and professional) students are not particularly known for paying attention to news or politics. There just isn’t time and energy for that. Yet, the proposed tax plan has made a lot of graduate students pay attention, on account of the proposal to tax tuition waivers. For many students, this would increase the amount of taxes they pay by several thousand dollars, which causes a lot of anxiety among a population that does not generally have a lot of extra money.

Graduate students organized a walkout today to protest the tax plan. As NPR reported,

“Graduate students around the country walked out of their classes, office hours, and research labs to protest the House Republican tax plan Wednesday.

‘This plan is going to be disastrous for higher ed,’ said Jack Nicoludis, a Harvard graduate student in chemistry, who helped organize a protest on the campus. He said the bill would more than double his taxes’ . . . “

Lego Grad Student provides a helpful illustration of how significantly taxes would increase for many students. PhD Comics has also chimed in about the tax plan.

Irrelevant of your political leanings and/or your opinion of the proposed tax plan, please pray and advocate for those who are worried that they would be negatively affected by it and that creative solutions might be found so that the good research and innovation that is done by graduate students (and universities in general) might continue.