This would allow all deserving students a high quality, free education while limiting the amount of waste and degree inflation that would result from a completely free university system.
So in essence, it's a system that's geared towards keeping the rich educated and the poor uneducated, by using a slight Catch-22.
Of course YMMV, and it often does, Brazil is huge and there are exceptions, but what I've laid out is what most commonly happens.
In the past few years though, the Government has built programs whose goal is to increase the amount of poor people who get educated, either by subsidizing the cost with tax money in private universities (Gasp! Socialism! :P) or by affirmative action with a quota system in public universities.
This brings about worries of its own, such as "Will people who are granted access to well-ranked Universities based primarily on their low income be able to actually follow through with the course?", for example, but overall the situation is an improvement.
California used to have a multitier system of tuition-free higher-education (two tiers of tuition-free public university, both selective but one moreso than the other, plus the community college system) along with private universities, so it worked somewhat like that, but that eroded over time.
The kind of people who advocate for fairness for the poor and minorities are more likely to advocate for moves back toward that system rather than away from it.