They also come with income based repayment plans that mean you'll never have to pay more than 10% of your discretionary income (income above 10% of the poverty line), and they are cancelled after 20 years of payment.

That is still a reasonable period of time to make them low risk. So we get a market flooded by cash. And now due the ubiquity of degrees, many are worthless but necessary. They are becoming the high school degree.

The risk doesn't really have anything to do with "a market flooded by cash".

The government distributes loans because legislation forces them to--not because they are low risk--and the money comes directly from the department of education not private investments. Private loans are only about 7% of the loan disbursements.

If that's the case, then I don't understand why the student loans are said to be such a big burden. It's just another tax, I wish more taxes were voluntary like that.

It's definitely the case. Part of the problem is that not everyone knows about income based repayment plans.

You mostly get a few groups complaining about the burden. People who don't know about income based repayment, people who make too much to qualify (basically what they'd pay if they paid 10% of their discretionary income is higher than the standard 10 year repayment plan), and people who took out private loans to go to for profit universities, or expensive private schools that weren't top tier (private loans are only 7% of total disbursements).

Add to that the arm chair analysts who see news stories about student loan debt and complain for them.

That's not to say that some of these grievances aren't legitimate. There really are people with $100k loans with useless degrees from for profit universities, but they are a small subset of loan borrowers.

thats only if its government loans. Private loans are still not dischargeable and don't have income based repayment

Private loans make up about 7% of student loans dispersed each year.

Is that current or always? I went to college 2007-2011 and the first two years everyone I knew got 5.5k and 6.5k loans from the government and then private loans for the rest. After the great recession no one could get private loans anymore and the government filled in the rest

Looking at the statistics, it looks like its been around that level for a while. Private loans make up a bit less than 10% of the overall outstanding student loan debt, not just new debt.