“Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property. Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.”
VI Writings of Thomas Jefferson, at 180—181 (Washington ed.), as quoted in Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966). Emphasis mine.
I am not a tax attorney or tax consultant. This post was written while I was an undergraduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, and Co-Chair of the International Student Advisory Board.
Universities often will choose not to issue this tuition statement to international students because those students can’t do anything with it. This is, however, an incorrect generalization.
Are international students able to use this form for anything?
Most international students are ineligible to claim those educational credits/deductions because they are nonresident aliens (e.g. F-1 student). These individuals would not benefit from having the 1098-T.
But some students, especially graduate students, may be eligible to claim credits/deductions because…
they are resident aliens under the substantial presence test, usually because they have stayed in the United States for more than 5 years;
they are nonresident aliens for immigration purposes, but resident aliens for tax purposes, maybe as spouses of American citizens or resident aliens; or
they are nonresident aliens for both immigration and tax purposes, but eligible dependents of parents who are resident aliens/permanent residents/citizens; those parents are able to claim these credits in certain situations.
Figure 2-2 from IRS Publication 970, illustrating who is an eligible student for the American Opportunity Credit. Note: not all eligible students can claim. See Publication 970 for a flowchart of who is eligible to claim.
I am an international student in the above categories. Can I get a 1098-T from my school?
The IRS says that universities “do not have to file Form 1098-T or furnish a statement for… nonresident alien students, unless requested by the student“. Additionally, they are not required to provide it for “students whose qualified tuition and related expenses are entirely waived or paid entirely with scholarships”.
You must still meet all of the other requirements to get a 1098-T:
Attend an eligible educational institution (college, university, vocational school, or other postsecondary educational institution in §481 of the Higher Education Act)
Have paid qualified tuition and related expenses in that tax year
i.e. tuition, fees, course materials required to be enrolled
does not include room, board, insurance, medical expenses including student health fees, transportation, and personal/living/family expenses
Receive credit for the completion of course work leading to a postsecondary degree, certificate, or other recognized postsecondary educational credential
i.e. most undergraduate bachelors programs and graduate masters and PhDs qualify
Have provided your SSN or ITIN to the educational institution either through student records or an additional Form W-9S
What are some potential hurdles?
I was in a situation this year where my university did not issue me a 1098-T, and responded to my request with a form letter:
Does every Penn student receive a 1098-T? Penn does not provide a 1098-T to non-resident aliens, or any student whose qualified charges are fully funded by grant, scholarship or tuition waivers, or any student who was enrolled in non-credit courses during the academic year.
They additionally stated,
“Though you might have received a 1098t form in the past, going forward as a Canadian citizen you will not receive one.”
As I’ve explained above in this post, this determination was a mistake. It conflates citizenship & immigration status with residency for tax purposes, and ignores the possibility that someone else other than me may be eligible to claim the credit.
Furthermore, even if I were a nonresident alien ineligible to claim the credit, nothing in the IRS regulations for Form 1098-T gives the educational institution the right, responsibility, or power to determine whether I might be eligible to claim the credit; nor does it permit them to deny a Form 1098-T to a nonresident alien’s request.
What does this situation reveal about international students?
First, on the superficial level, this situation reveals that immigration status and residency for immigration purposes differs from tax status and residency for tax purposes. Clearly, not all employees who handle these cases are aware of these stipulations.
More importantly…
International students are a large, diverse, and varied community. International students have complex needs based on their individual families’ statuses. It is a mistake to define broad, indiscriminate policies that treat all international students identically.
If you think I’ve made a mistake in this post, or wish to disagree with my conclusion here, I’d like to hear from you. Comment below or send me an email using the contact form.
At the same time, I started looking at switching domUs from Ubuntu—which worked great, by the way—to Fedora. This was purely due to personal preference, given my penchant for keeping software up-to-date even at the risk of instability, not any failings of Ubuntu.
The issue, of course, is that Fedora isn’t supported out of the box by XenServer or its management console XenCenter, and the wealth of knowledge out there typically pertains to older versions of Fedora and XenServer. Some IT firm even posted a tip to use the “Other install media” option for installing Fedora 20, which practically defeats the point of using Xen virtualization, since that creates a fully-virtualized guest (HVM) rather than a paravirtualized domU.
So I set out to update the existing methods of installing older versions of Fedora as a paravirtualized guest to the new release, Fedora 20 “Heisenbug”.
Credit where credit is due
I’m a sucker for giving credit to everyone and anyone, but in this case a few sources really formed the basis for what I’ve done:
The master-branch files are typically tested, while the develop-branch files may introduce new features that are not yet fully vetted. (As the MIT License describes, everything is provided with no guarantees.)
The basic idea behind the post-installation script here is to create a legacy GRUB menu.lst file, which pygrub on XenServer can interpret to boot into a paravirtualized guest.
Update: now, the post-installation script doesn’t bother with a fake menu.lst at all, and instead makes GRUB2 configuration files. Based on reports that making slight alterations to the autogenerated GRUB2 grub.cfg file to make it compatible works, and based on the changes made to pygrub in upstream Xen (which have not yet been integrated into XenServer 6.2.0 SP1), I made the script tweak GRUB2 files and regenerate a grub.cfg with grub2-mkconfig. This should be robust enough to support future kernel updates!
On one of my sites running WordPress, Akismet (and other antispam plugins) is not installed. In some ways, it has served as a honeypot, revealing interesting tidbits about how spambots work.
Fascinatingly, there were several hundred of these comments, all identical to each other. They look like templates for comments to be generated by spam-producing software, except that the software never processed the templates and posted them verbatim instead:
I’ve been a proud Android user for years. Yesterday, I became even stauncher of a loyalist.
I only had to look at some of the incredibly stupid decisions Apple made with its iOS 7 redesign. There’s no need for me to write a long rant because that’s already been done — by countless individuals.
Basically, there was nothing significantly innovative in this iteration, and the design is now a horrible, inferior mixture of Windows Phone/Metro, Android, and WebOS.
Just compare the icons of “stock” apps on Android 4.2.2 (on my Nexus 4, left) vs iOS 7 (from the Apple site).
Both sets have moved away from skeuomorphism, but Android’s is more professional
The legacy rounded corners in the iOS designs, the mid-2000s gradients, and bubbly, cartoonish icons don’t fit the image of a polished operating system. The roundness of it all is really bad considering the emphasis on flatness in the calculator and call screen (or FaceTime incoming screen).
What really struck me was the redesign of the 4 core dock icons. I don’t think I’m crazy in picking stock Android over iOS 7 on this one:
A typical set of Android dock icons compared to their iOS 7 equivalents
I’m calling out The Daily Pennsylvanian for worst uses of Flash, ever. Flash animations make sense when interactivity is demanded, and only then, in rare cases.
But my gripe isn’t with Flash itself, or even with mobile compatibility — I’m just upset that people are using a medium that doesn’t make sense for things that shouldn’t even be interactive. I get it; college kids like to play around with software, or whatever. But you guys gotta stop this.
