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In Russia there's the Independent University of Moscow, which probably doesn't have any expenses other than the salaries of the professors.
What a university needs is skilled scientists and well-prepared students willing to work hard, and that isn't expensive.
But if they aren't properly prepared they'll require individual tutoring. There are probably some university students that can't even do their calculations mentally and sit there writing furiously when doing problems on exams. Obviously that should have been dealt with when they were 13 or something, but it rarely has.
So enrolled students could choose to take that course to brush up on or learn these fundamentals so everyone was (in theory) on the expected skill level. Other than that there was pretty much no hand holding - 18+ year olds are considered adults after all.
It worked fine, but I believe that with real training in doing algebra and calculus mentally can get you further, but that this training takes more time and requires actual tutoring if you want the broad masses of suitable-for-university students to acquire the skills.
What calculations? There were no calculations in my Applied Physics finals in 1977.
I have a strategy: first it try to do it mentally, if I can't I start doing it on paper, then once I solve it I wait for a long while and then I do it mentally.
My impression is that that kind of thing isn't really taught and I believe it needs to be taught.
1. It's not just education per se, it's public _research_ in universities that takes up a lot of the funding, and that is expensive. And the marriage of higher teaching and research is a solid principle (often identified with von Humboldt, the Prussian minister of education who successfully promoted this model of a university).
2. Cheap tuition is often/usually the lesser part of funding, with the major being state budgets and donations by individual benefactors and commercial companies (or in rare cases, profits off of university endowments).
I quite like the German system here, there isn't a large prestige difference between universities. Of course there are some that have a better reputation for some topics, but it's not so much that it would seriously affect your chances to get hired later. You can get a pretty good education for free, and there isn't as much effort and drama around applying for universities like in the US.
If you are paying through the nose for a bachelor’s degree and not from a rich family, then that means you are getting bamboozled at a private school when you could have bought the same “prestige” at any number of cheaper state schools.
It was not free at all. It was payed with confiscatory taxes, total lack of freedom to choose anything(some guy will choose what you will do the rest of your life when you are a kid). People in charge made sure their children had the best education with schools that were only for the children of the people in the Party, or the people that lived in the big cities like Moscow, Leningrad, with internal passports that forbid people to move from second-class cities to first class, like in China today.
Not to talk about the fact that over 30-40% of the "high quality education" material and time was actually indoctrination in Marxism like also remains in China today.
By the way, in the Eastern Block something like 90% of the money went to internal repression(secret services and Police) and the military. Prestigious engineers could only work for the military.
And no matter how much educated you were, they could make you lose your job if you did not behave and make you into a garbage collector.
I know because I had family members that came from the Eastern Block.
And in the rest of Europe, the education in cities like Prague or Warsaw, Budapest was way better before they became occupied.