This anecdote isn't perfect being that I was attending a private college at the time and I'm fully aware that the arguments for "tuition free college" are usually focused on public institutions; but, it's still relevant.
I was student body vice president at my college for a year. One of my duties was to deal with plagiarism cases with the administration and faculty. I was the only voice in the room calling for expulsion. In one case a student had clearly plagiarized his paper; but, on top of that, it was a 500 word essay for an acting class that was only worth five percent of his grade.
Again, I said that he should be expelled. My reasoning at the time, because I was still young and stupid, was simply because that was what was supposed to happen when you commit plagiarism in college.
In retrospect, I was still right; but, the ethical implications were greater than I realized - especially in a world wherein most people my age and younger think that college should be paid for by the tax payer.
How do we morally justify taking $15 grand a year from a kid who cares so little about his education that he can't be bothered to write a 500 word essay? How can we take the money from a person who lacks the mental fortitude to realize that the safer bet would have been to simply not turn in the paper and lose the five percent than it would be to attempt to dig up somebody else's work and pass it off as his own?
Now, flip it, how do you justify demanding that the tax payers put up the cash for a person to go to college who cares that little?
Where the money is coming from doesn't change the financial incentives of faculty and administrators. If they're getting paid they're getting paid. There are major ethical problems as higher education exists as it is in regard to letting teenagers make life-changing financial decisions. It's morally wrong to let an seventeen year-old put him or herself $70,000 in debt for a useless degree like sociology. But, the solution isn't to force other people to pay for it.
We need to stop pretending that everybody is college material and we need to stop punishing people for not going to college.
The best class that I took in college was at Montana State. We had a hundred and seventy students at the beginning of the class. Fewer than sixty took the final exam. A lot of the people who dropped out are probably doing as well in life if not better than I am; so, it's not an insult to say that the kids who dropped weren't college material. They weren't, they shouldn't have been in college, they shouldn't have been wasting their time and money and they certainly shouldn't be wasting other people's money. College simply shouldn't be a prerequisite for success in life.
The more we push college in the direction of being more accessible, the more we're going to exacerbate the problems.