<p>I have signed contract with private schools where I would be responsible for the entire year tuition if I should choose not to attend. But, there is always a big but, if the spot could be filled than you could get your money back. The point is the school is just trying protect any financial loss it may incur. This is no different than a ballet school, where they require you to pay up front for the year’s tuition. You may ask, will if I only go for 2 months, couldn’t you try to get someone to fill my spot? No, it’s very difficult to replace someone at the same level once the term has started.</p>
<p>In the college deposit case, any new vacancy could be filled by many candidates on their WL prior to the beginning of school term. So, where is the financial lost for them? Now, if the term has started, and you are 2 months into it, then you shouldn’t expect money back if you decide to leave because it would be hard for the school to get someone else to fill your spot.</p>
<p>At the same time, if you made a commitment to a school that has a hard time to replace you, I think you should be liable for the deposit plus the tuition. I think I may have read some where a few years back that Yale didn’t even need your deposit (not sure if it’s still true). My kids’ high school will refund people’s deposit because it claims it has enough people on its WL to fill the whole class.</p>
<p>“Only if they are required to maintain your current position. They are NOT deductible on schedule A in order to get a degree that qualifies you for a new job.”</p>
<p>I didn’t say that they were. I was talking about the philosophy of the deductibility of an expense related to generating income.</p>
<p>Sure. But the tickets are his property at the point he decides to give them back. If he can’t go, he could give the tickets to a friend or family member or a perfect stranger, or sell them on the street or on e-bay or through an online ticket brokerage site. Or give them back to the Opera, at his election, in which case he’s given them something of value—indeed, the something for which it’s easy to determine fair market value, because it’s just the going rate. Forfeiting a deposit is clearly not an analogous situation. If you forfeit your deposit to a school, you’re not donating property that belongs to you; you didn’t have the right to give that seat to a friend or family member or perfect stranger, or to sell it on the street or on e-bay or through an online college admissions broekr. If you decide not to attend, you don’t “give” the deposit to the school, you forfeit it—nothing elective about it, you simply have no choice in the matter. In fact, I’d go a step further: once you write the check and they cash it, it’s their money, it’s not in any sense yours to get back or to make other disposition of. It’s just plain fraud to go back and try to retroactively recharacterize it as a donation, when you didn’t have donative intent at the time you made the payment. You bought an option on attending; if you attend it’s credited towards the full purchase price, if you don’t attend, well, you paid to preserve the option for however long you had it.</p>
<p>Now I suppose you might try to make an analogy with the opera tickets by saying that what you’re “donating” to the college is not the money, but the seat that you’re electing not to use, which they can then give to someone else. But the problem there is that because that seat is not transferable, it has no fair market value. Once it’s awarded to you, you can’t resell it, and for their part, the school isn’t going to award it to the highest bidder. They don’t sell seats as full property rights. It’s more in the nature of a license, personal to the admitted student and not transferable, which simply expires if the admitted student elects not to use it. They then issue a new license to someone off their waitlist, on exactly the same terms. So no donation there, either.</p>