Summary
Education tax credits validate 40% below IRS actuals, and the mechanism is a near-empty input: qualified_tuition_expenses is populated on only 641 of 160,858 person records (weighted $4.5B) in the released dataset.
Evidence
On populace_us_2024.h5 (…f0af251…20260620):
|
value |
qualified_tuition_expenses nonzero records |
641 / 160,858 persons |
| weighted total |
$4.54B |
simulated education_tax_credits (nonref AOTC + LLC, liability-capped) |
$4.56B |
| IRS SOI TY2023 actual (Pub 1304 Table 3.3, nonrefundable education credit) |
$7.55B |
For scale: roughly 8–9M returns claim education credits (SOI TY2023: 7.2M nonrefundable-credit returns), against ~19M postsecondary students; aggregate qualified tuition paid is tens of billions. $4.5B across 641 records means the input is essentially absent — the simulated credit can only reach 60% of actual claims, and the refundable AOTC and any tuition-linked analysis inherit the same gap.
Suggested fix
Impute qualified_tuition_expenses (and the AOTC eligibility inputs — enrollment status/half-time flags) from enrollment + published tuition distributions (NCES/IPEDS), or calibrate education-credit claims to the SOI totals.
Found via the SOI-actuals baseline backtest on the reform-validation page (PolicyEngine/calibration-diagnostics). Sibling of #225 (SSN) and #252 (auto-loan) — same class: model logic exists, input never imputed.
Summary
Education tax credits validate 40% below IRS actuals, and the mechanism is a near-empty input:
qualified_tuition_expensesis populated on only 641 of 160,858 person records (weighted $4.5B) in the released dataset.Evidence
On
populace_us_2024.h5(…f0af251…20260620):qualified_tuition_expensesnonzero recordseducation_tax_credits(nonref AOTC + LLC, liability-capped)For scale: roughly 8–9M returns claim education credits (SOI TY2023: 7.2M nonrefundable-credit returns), against ~19M postsecondary students; aggregate qualified tuition paid is tens of billions. $4.5B across 641 records means the input is essentially absent — the simulated credit can only reach 60% of actual claims, and the refundable AOTC and any tuition-linked analysis inherit the same gap.
Suggested fix
Impute
qualified_tuition_expenses(and the AOTC eligibility inputs — enrollment status/half-time flags) from enrollment + published tuition distributions (NCES/IPEDS), or calibrate education-credit claims to the SOI totals.Found via the SOI-actuals baseline backtest on the reform-validation page (PolicyEngine/calibration-diagnostics). Sibling of #225 (SSN) and #252 (auto-loan) — same class: model logic exists, input never imputed.