Tuition is not fake. It's not like that's monopoly money or something. That's real money that is actually paid for real resources that are consumed by the student on the campus that need to be paid for (instructor time, instruction space, etc).
It is fake after your first year usually. You arent taking any classes but you are signed up for a few credit hours of some fake grad student class with 300 people you don't know and a professor you never heard of teaching it in a classroom that says TBD for the entire semester, because the class doesn't exist and only serves to check a box for the administration that you are in fact a student and eligible for the student health insurance plan.
Tuition is not just used to fund classes, it supports all kinds of campus resources for the student. Tuition dollars are used to pay salaries, it couldn’t be any more real.
I mean usually those external resources are paid for by the student activity fee, a line item that grad students usually cover out of their own pocket. The other stuff I mean I guess you can get pedantic and say money is fungible, this gets used to keep the lights on at some building or whatever, but its important to know that these salaries are not making or breaking any department. A department might only have a few dozen grad students, these aren't significant amounts of money for a university. Keep in mind you have to pay this fake tuition for your student after the department takes half your research grant already. Some times its cheaper for a professor to hire a post doc than a grad student even with the salary differences given the tuition requirement.
