SCU School of Business Alumni Group on LinkedIn

The Leavey School of Business now offers an "official" LinkedIn Group for alumni and students who have completed at least 36 units. Invitations were sent via email to alumni in April 2007. For those who may not have received or lost the invitation, I've copied the text of it here, with one minor modification: I've replaced a link to LinkedIn's web site with a link to SCU's website (where the original link can be found):

As an SCU Business School Alum, you are invited to make use of a valuablenew tool available to you: the SCU Business School Alumni Group on LinkedIn.Through the members-only SCU Business School Alumni you can:

• Leverage the power of your alumni network to find and reach the new business contacts you need;
• Accelerate your career through referrals from SCU Business School Alumni group members;
• Know more than a name - view rich professional profiles from fellow SCU Business School Alumni members;
• Let other SCU Business School Alumni know what you have to offer to them and their contacts;
• Limit your network searches to other SCU Business School Alumni only, if you wish to do so.

LinkedIn is the leading professional network tool online, used by over 9 million professionals worldwide.

Access to special SCU Business School Alumni features on LinkedIn is free, and is available to SCU Business School Alumni only.

Whether you use LinkedIn already or you're new to LinkedIn, please join the members-only SCU Business School Alumni group here: http://www.scu.edu/business/alumni/connections/index.cfm

Looking forward to making connections with you on LinkedIn!

The SCU Business School Alumni and External Relations Office www.scu.edu/business/alumni
business-alumni@...
408-554-4872
832 Market Street
Santa Clara , CA 95053-0410

For information about other online networks for SCU School of Business alumni, see the previous post Finding Contacts at a Company or Organization.

Deducting MBA Tuition as Work-Related Education

At the Santa Clara University Life Long Network Yahoo! Group, Alexey Orlovsky posted the following about claiming MBA tuition as a tax deduction:

Hi everybody,

I was wondering, have anyone tried deducting complete MBA tuition as work-related education?

The benefit is obvious – rather than deducting only up to 4000 (as adjustment for AGI), you got to deduct all of your yearly tuition and mileage for the travel to school from work at 48 cents per mile as an itemized deduction, which results in a few thousand dollars shaved off your tax bill.

This is somewhat tricky and is sometimes challenged by IRS, but it is completely legal as long as you follow the guidelines of IRS publication 970 section 12: http://www.irs.gov/publications/p970/ch12.html

The criteria for eligibility are rather strict, but among all types of professional education, part-time MBA seems most matching these criteria, e.g.:
http://www.generationtax.com/mba.html

Also, an excellent review with the reference to recent case law in CPA Journal:
http://www.nysscpa.org/cpajournal/2006/406/essentials/p44.htm

Does anybody have a first-hand experience or knowledge about this deduction?

In my particular case, I am hesitant because of two reasons:
(1) I am not sure if MBA education qualifies for me as a software engineer as “maintaining or improving skills needed in your present work”
(2) For how long should I stay within software development business after graduating MBA program so that IRS cannot challenge my return on the grounds that MBA “is part of a program of study that will qualify you for a new trade or business” (they seem to be doing this often)? Is this 3 years after which they typically do not audit returns? This may be too long – after all, why taking an MBA to stay within your old non-business trade.

I think this discussion may be of general interest to the LLN group.

Thanks,
Alexey

If you have any advice or comments about this issue, you can respond to Alexey's post.