Having had a tuition waver before, there was absolutely nothing to report (no money paid, no money taxed), it most definitely had no impact on tax filing complexity. What they are proposing is to make tuition wavers a “real thing” rather than something that just existed on paper in a university somewhere, that is bound to make life much more complicated. It will also probably completely restructure graduate education in the USA, since many grad students have free take no classes and rather take 9 credits if “independent research”, which basically means they get to work in a lab.