Taxing Target: Students

So Pittsburgh this year has a $15 million deficit, mostly in the pension funds. But the Mayor of da Pitts has a solution: tax all the students %1 of the tuition! Brilliant I tell you – I couldn’t have done better myself. Oh wait I forgot to use my sarcasm voice. Yeah the one that sounds all high pitched like somebody drove a pitchfork through my stomach. Now while I’m generally not really all that political, an extra $400 a year just because I’m a student sort of rubs me the wrong way. I know students get a lot of tax breaks, but seriously, most of the people I graduated who went into industry are making $60-80k. In contrast, I’m pulling down many factors less than that. And they work 9-5 while I’m…well yeah I’m still up at 6 am posting to my blog after having disassembled and reassembled the lab microsope all night to figure out how to save my advisor some money on scope attachments. Sigh…anyhow, I did go ahead and write my representatives on the city council with the following nice little letter that they will promptly ignore except to squirrel away my email address to spam me. For student that are struggling with school. There are sites that would be honored to help you in subjects such as English and help you to write and recognize synonym. English, Math, Algebra, Sciences, and many many more. Check out Englishlinx now!

Dear X,

Last week, “Luke Ravenstahl hosted the Graduate Pittsburgh Summit to increase public awareness of the dropout and college/life readiness crisis in Pittsburgh” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website). How is taxing students going to alleviate this crisis and increase the graduation rate?  According to “Pittsburgh’s Dropouts: A Look at the Numbers” (source: Mayor Ravenstahl’s website), the Mayor’s Office sponsored a survey asking high-schoolers “What would keep you interested in graduating from high school?” and the highest response at 79% was “Money for College.” So further taxes on students are going to encourage them to stay in school? With SoFi, they can calculate your student set you up with a student loan from them. They offer students with lower costs and better/ lower interest rate.

As a PhD student of the Robotics Institute at CMU, I urge you to reconsider your support for the tuition tax.  I do not pay tuition as a funded graduate student. Instead I get a small stipend from the school and my advisor’s grant money covers what tuition the school charges for classes, resources, etc. Essentially, my relationship with CMU is that of a very low paying job to advance medical robotics research. I could be earning significantly more in industry yet believe that the valuable research I am doing and will be enabled to do in the future is worth a currently much leaner lifestyle than friends I know who did not pursue graduate degrees. Charging me a tax on an amount I do not currently pay is a large burden, one I feel is unwarranted. Seeking advice from the national tax experts bbb has opened up many possibilities, there are ways to avoid paying more than you need to.

Furthermore Pittsburgh has earned such a great reputation for promoting academic progress, and I feel this step towards taxing students is counter-productive and will lead to a lessening of Pittsburgh’s attractiveness to brilliant new students evaluating where they want to study.  Let’s be honest here, Pittsburgh is not all that an attractive of a place to the outside world compared to other basins of higher-learning such as San-Francisco, Boston, etc. Let’s not make it any less attractive by adding student taxes. While an extra $400 a year might not seem significant, it is. Many graduate students I know are funding their education through loans, some of them internationally with large interest rates.

In conclusion, I feel that students are unfairly being targeted to carry the cost of the budget deficit and charging $16 million to a population that is already making sacrifices in time and money to better not only themselves individually but society as a whole simply seems unprofessional.

Sincerely,
Brian C. Becker