Education

Those summary page numbers can signify different things (depending on the tax topic). In the case of education expenses, it’s showing the amount that’s being used for a credit or deduction. A zero there probably means your 1098-T box 5 financial aid amount is greater than the tuition in box 1, so there’s nothing left to use for a credit. (As long as all the education info has been entered — otherwise the zero could just mean the program isn’t yet able to calculate an accurate result…)

Note that any dollar of “qualifying education expenses” (i.e. tuition and fees, plus some other things, depending on which credit) can be used for only one tax benefit: to either exclude a dollar of financial aid from tax or to get a credit (but never both—that’s called “double-dipping”). However, it is possible to say that you used your financial aid on something else (besides tuition), increasing your tax on that, so that you have more qualifying tuition to use for an education credit which is actually larger than that additional tax on the financial aid (sometimes much larger).

For example, if you have $4,000 of scholarship funds and $4,000 of tuition, you can say you used all $4,000 of the scholarship on “room & board” (which is not a qualified expense, and so it makes the whole amount taxable). That means you can use the entire $4,000 of tuition for a maximum “American Opportunity Credit” (the excellent credit to which Hal_Al referred, which is a dollar-for-dollar “refund” of the first $2,000 of qualifying education expenses, and 25% of the second $2,000).

Here is the IRS telling us about this treatment, and here’s a TurboTax support discussion with some of the logistics in the program. Note that it is more applicable to undergraduates (as the American Opportunity Credit is the best one, and only available to them), and also that the scholarship must not be specifically earmarked for actual tuition payments (see RaifH’s post in that last thread).

The concepts here are pretty simple, but applying them can get a little tricky (which is usually the case in taxes). However, @ahzimmerman, this is an area where people leave a lot of money on the table (because sometimes it almost seems like cheating), so I recommend checking it out, and following up with questions if you have any!