Your comment expresses a lot of anger and resentment toward higher education that’s grounded in stereotypes and misinformation. I teach at a university. We don’t have safe spaces or trigger warnings. We offer graduate degrees in practical skills. We have almost nothing in common with elite institutions that fuel the kind of outrage expressed by you and others. And yet we’ll suffer just as much under this new tax bill.

The biggest myth is that faculty and administrators at a university have any say in tuition prices. We don’t. The Board of Trustees does. Over the past decade, CEOs and “business leaders” have found their way onto these boards and jacked up tuition in order to make universities more “profitable.” Meanwhile, state legislatures have gutted funding for higher education, almost ensuring that tuition remains high.

In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need tuition waivers. Democrats and Republicans need to sit down and have serious conversations about how to fix higher education. But this tax bill doesn’t even begin to solve the problem. It does nothing but punish graduate students here and now. It’s a lazy solution that plays well with people who don’t like “liberal” universities.