You can only claim educational expenses, for purposes of qualifying for a federal income tax benefit, to the extent that your out-of-pocket tuition costs exceed your tax-free tuition stipends, grants, scholarships, or tuition fee waivers.
For example, let's say that you school's published tuition cost is billed at $10,000 per year. In addition, you then receive a combination of fee waivers, scholarships, and grants, that manage to pay for $8,000 of this amount. Your out-of-pocket tuition cost to you would then be $10,000 - $8,000 = $2,000.
In that example it would be a total of just $2,000 that you could apply toward your tuition expenses tax benefits (and input into the TurboTax software), even though the headline tuition rate is $10,000.
Hopefully, this answer makes some sense.
Finally, as a courtesy to you, we've gathered
together a pair of our favorite TurboTax FAQ links on the various (3 in total)
educational tax benefits available for the 2016 tax year. You may wish to
read them, if you have not already.
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/College/Take-Advantage-of-Two-Education-Tax-Cred...
https://turbotax.intuit.com/tax-tools/tax-tips/College/Deduction-for-Higher-Education/INF12002.html
Pleas also see IRS Publication 970
(Tax Benefits for Education)
https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p970.pdf
Thanks for asking this important
question, and good luck with your studies.
