This would save young Americans from going into crippling debt, but it would also make a university degree completely unaffordable for most. However, in the age of the Internet, that doesn’t mean they couldn’t get an education.
Consider the long term impact of this. There are a lot of different ways such a situation could go, for better and for worse.
Glad you were able to graduate. That being said, invalidating my friends’ successes is pretty shitty. I was only speculating whether things got better or worse.
Regardless, after skimming through some more recent articles, I still don’t think making colleges universally free would help inequality long-term. The rich will still find some way of getting an advantage by, for example, attending private schools with legacy admissions. With our current system, public and private universities are treated the same except for their sticker price, and any publicly funded “free university” program would more than likely only cover public universities and limit choice.