This is how it has to start in the US. Subsidizing free college in other countries is much easier because colleges there keep their costs under control, focusing on education and research over the "college experience", so the costs per student of running said colleges is much lower. There is SO much wasteful spending, brought about by the greed of many US colleges for the near unlimited flow of student loan money coming from lenders especially prominent in the 2000s and 2010s, that can be thrown out to cut those costs.

Not to mention that fewer people in free college countries actually attend a university, with education systems in those countries designed to steer many students towards places like trade/ag/other schools if they show aptitude in areas they really don't need a 4-year degree for or really just don't meet the academic standard to get into those universities. Millennials and Gen Z were all told in the US that we HAD to go to college to get anywhere in the world and we were all pushed in that direction whether it was a good direction for us or not. Now there's a big labor shortage here in the trades and other blue collar jobs because so few younger people have the proper skills, which aren't really taught in four-year institutions, or the desire to take on the training or effort to gain those skills. Fewer students spending four years in an expensive university and more in two-year schools or trade schools has the advantage of both lowering overall education costs and providing a workforce with more diverse skills, regardless of the time needed to train them.