That makes sense. The only argument I can come up with against that is the fact that my employer contributes ~5k per year to the loans, so if I were to pay them off super early, I might miss out on "free" money from them in that regard. What do you think?
What is the $5k/year based on? Is it a percentage of your payments, or a total no matter how much you are paying?
If the latter, I recommend doing that you can to get your payments as close to $5k/year* as possible and going from there. Is it possible for them to recalculate your repayments after you've paid off some principal? (I don't know the answer, but hopefully your lender would) Or, if there is more than one loan, pay off enough so that all that is left are payments amounting to $5k/year.
You will be getting a little boost because you can then deduct up to $2k (or $2500?) of your paid SL interest on your taxes. However, that boost will be offset by the fact that you will owe taxes on the $5k bonus. In the end, you can crunch the numbers like this:
Total annual SL payments - $5k - tax deduction + taxes paid on $5k = annual cost of keeping the SLs
My guess is that you have very little net cost with keeping your SLs as long as you are matching your payments as closely as you can to that $5k/year.