re: Should I knock out the rest of my student loan?

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Do you have any clue how to determine your MAGI? Serious question, because from the sound of this post I'm going to assume you don't.

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By MAGI, I assume you mean Modified Adjusted Gross Income for the purposes of determining your student loan deduction. This particular modification is to exclude any student loan interest deducted from your AGI. But you are right, I did include some below the line deductions that would not actually decrease MAGI, however this mistake would actually make your opinion less valid, as we are talking strictly Gross Income here and the individuals in question would make even less. I was simply trying to prove 100k out to be above 80k, so that I could use the 100k figure as it is good for illustrative purposes.

You have tried to insult my intelligence and knowledge in 2 posts now, while not providing any sort of reasoning/evidence as to why my opinion is not valid.

Question for you, what did you score on REG? Because by the sound of your posts, I'm going to assume yours wasn't as high as mine.

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And I would say the typical average student that has taken out loans isn't coming out of the gate making 100k.

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And I would say you are whiffing on the point here. This is a matter of proactive tax planning, not retroactive like you seem to think. In certain fields, your education is an absolute requirement of doing business.The US Tax code typically views costs of doing business, or certifications/education required in the field as deductions from AGI. Those jobs tend to be higher paying, because they require more training (cost) to get them. By allowing someone to deduct those costs that is in a lower paying job, and not the person who has a higher paying job (from our example, these 2 ppl have the same ratio of debt to income) which required more training, there is an inherent penalty (or lack of incentive) to pursue the higher paying career.

It doesn't matter how much you make, if you look at the purpose of the deduction, why it is there in the first place, it is related to generating income and encouraging education. If you cannot ever deduct for the latter, then the system is not encouraging certain types of education. I would call this a penalty.

ETA: Also, this doesn't take into account the possibility that you have any other sort of income, whether it be interest, rental income, dividends (whether they were actually paid or just increase your tax basis), capital gains, etc. You could have a taxable event that is out of your control that could put you over the MAGI limit hat you don't actually see any cash for that year, and you planned on taking the deduction. That tax event will likely reverse out in future years, but it affected you in a year that you planned on taking the deduction. There are just various scenarios that prove out that this deduction rewards lower income workers, or more importantly, former students that are achieving a relatively low ROI on their education.