Ask Your Accountant

While I am not your tax accountant, I do hope you will look into a possible tuition write-off. Recently the "Clarke Decision" ruled in favor of Lori Singleton Clarke, an MBA pursuing the degree to improve existing skills. She was allowed the work-related tuition write off as a qualifying "miscellaneous itemized deduction" within the years she paid for advancing her education. This may be good news for non-sponsored EMBA students, increasingly the rule rather than the exception as corporate sponsorship has taken a break.
Here's why:

Career Enhancing, Not Career Switching: EMBA programs were designed as general management degrees for professionals already deep into career specialties (10-20 years typically), where they need to enhance those skills to stay current and continue moving up their career path to senior leadership. To the extent that students are planning to stay in their field and thus pursue general management programs without concentrations of study in a different field of business, this bodes well for tax implications. (Conversely, many weekday MBA programs and some newer iterations of EMBA programs are designed -- through concentrations or internships or both -- to enable career switchers, typically at a lower experience level.) Improving skills is the key -- the CPA to controller or CAO path, the technical lead to CTO path, the sales director to EVP sales transition, etc. EMBA programs were designed for this upward path, to the extent they still encourage incoming students looking to escalate versus change career direction.

Employer Not Requiring/Sponsoring: The proactive nature of Ms. Clarke's case seems to have helped. She was not required to, but did pursue advanced education related to her job to be better at it. As a bridge against uncertainty in business and the job market, that's smart. I'd rather have an MBA than not in this job market. One of my recent EMBA graduates told me that a large number of her colleagues were laid off, but she was specifically told (in this medium sized company) that she was not, because her MBA would enable her to pinch hit across the organization when the number of employees is down. As she put it, "That's one sort of six-figure ROI that's pretty critical, even if it's not a promotion."

The education cannot lead to a new line of work altogether, from what I understand. In some cases, the marketing executive may be able to write-off the marketing portion of EMBA education and organization management courses if presumably in a leadership role, if not the whole degree. So now is a good time to talk to you accountant and Uncle Sam about continuing in your path and strengthening your position in your field through the EMBA program.