[bitL]

I would absolutely recommend freelancing to people who need to study to move up, e.g. doing Stanford online masters or MBA and can put tuition into taxes. Rarely companies reimburse full cost and as a sole proprietor one has a chance to write education off via taxes, i.e. no student debt and top-end education/network.

[ensignavenger]

In the US, anyone can deduct tuition and fees- and even better than a deduction (or "write-off" for a business) there are some tax credits you can get, too. https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/tax-benefits-for-education-info...

I don't see how being a freelancer improves the tax benefit over this at all.

EDIT: I did find this: "If you are self-employed, you deduct your expenses for qualifying work-related education directly from your self-employment income. This reduces the amount of your income subject to both income tax and self-employment tax."

So perhaps in some cases if you exhaust the credits having a deduction from the self employment tax would save you a bit on the self employment tax. But I would think in most situations the difference would not be all that large. And if your employer would provide even a partial tuition reimbursement, that would likely eclipse any tax benefit from being self employed. All of it is very situation dependent, though.