The waivers are meant to acknowledge that while graduate students must technically be enrolled in classes while working on the research portion of their degrees, they are not taking up the resources tuition is supposed to be paying for.
So tuition gets waived, and they don't get taxed on a "gift" that's entirely for handling an administrative process.
Exactly! At least 50% of graduate classes are something like "preparing for qualifying exams" or "dissertation research in progress" and meet zero times a week for zero hours.
So tuition gets waived, and they don't get taxed on a "gift" that's entirely for handling an administrative process.