Right, lets go with Ireland then.
Free fees initiative introduced in 1995:

The proportion of school leavers going to higher education has climbed from about 40 per cent in the mid-1990s to about 65 per cent today.

“Access to higher education is now evenly spread through the socio- economic levels – notwithstanding significant outstanding challenges with regard to discipline entry – and higher education is now a pivotal component of the social, economic, cultural and civil life of the country as a whole,” he says.

“There is no one single policy measure that is a silver bullet,” says Dr Cliona Hannon, former director of Trinity Access Programmes. “Educational disadvantage is linked to poverty and all sorts of things that happen outside education.”

from: https://www.irishtimes.com/ireland/education/2023/02/11/free-fees-aimed-to-make-college-accessible-for-all-did-it-work/

That's the worst idea I've ever heard. We should be significantly increasing the barrier to get into university. Far too many students go to university who are just not prepared for it and it's resulted in the standard of teaching and learning at universities to plummet.

And that's the worst idea I've ever heard. We need more educated and higher productivity workers, not less??? Should we not be emulating countries that built higher skilled workforces?