The reply is problematic because it states what to do in the future, but not what to do now. Past versions of TurboTax allowed the user to enter ALL college expenses - tuition, books, fees, housing, meals, etc. and then used the information to determine if a tax credit was available and if not, to off-set against a 1099-Q distribution from a 529 savings account. The 2019 version of TT does not appear to allow these entries, or at least is not prompting the user for these entries - only asking for "qualified education expenses;" which is a specific tax-related term. For certain, the user (usually a parent of a kid in college) should enter in the 1099-Q information and then should off-set this with all education costs - but exactly how to do this in the 2019 TT version is not yet clear to me.
