Does cost of purchasing data count toward educational expenses?

[John Williams]

I'm an international F1 Ph.D. student, and I get scholarships. I recently purchased expensive data to use for my research and dissertation. My question is whether I can count it as an educational expense.

edit: data refers to research dataset (database).

[Hal_Al]

Q.  My question is whether I can count expensive data, I purchased,  to use for my research and dissertation  as an educational expense.

A. No, you cannot count it, as a qualified expense, for claiming the Lifetime Learning Credit (LLC).  Qualified expenses are only tuition, fees and materials required to be purchased from the school.

You can count it, as a qualified expense, for a 529 plan distribution. 

[Vanessa A]

As an F-1 student are you filing as a resident or non resident alien?  

If you are a non-resident alien, then you would need to contact a company like sprintax.com for help with determining what is deductible on your 1040NR.  

What do you mean by expensive data?  Like a data plan for the internet?  Or facts and figures from a scholarly source?  Or something else?  Basically, only expenses that are required as a condition of enrollment are qualified education expenses for claiming education credits. 

[John Williams]

Here, data refers dataset for research.

[DaveF1006]

It depends on if it was required by the school to use for your research and dissertation. Please review this link for further information.

[John Williams]

To  DaveF1006:

My entire dissertation revolves around this dataset, and hence, it was necessary for continuing my studies given my current research topic. But I didn't "have" to purchase this dataset, as nobody forced me to. I could use another thesis topic with another dataset or another topic with no dataset at all. 

TLDR: Once I chose this topic, I had to purchase this dataset. However, I could choose many different topics that did not need purchasing a dataset.