I don't really see what's fair about being put into crushing debt for a degree that may not even get one a job but whatever you say.
This is strawmanning. I wasn't talking about tuition fees that "put people into crushing debt". However, Dutch tuition fees of around 2000 euros a year (and grants for people from low-income backgrounds) seem reasonable to me.
I find it hard to believe that one could in good faith argue that one should have to pay one's own money for the minimum level of education required to do respectably in the world. Previously in most places that level of education was high school. In today's economy it's college. If free university was good enough for a Britain in which a university education wasn't strictly speaking necessary for most people, it certainly ought to be good enough for a Britain in which one is.
Most people in highly developed countries still didn't do a program in higher education and most of them end up in perfectly respectable jobs. Of course this is not to say that people should be held back by their background, everyone who has the brains should be able to do a higher education program, but I find many jobs for people with lower education highly respectable, to be honest oftentimes even more so than the jobs for higher educated people.
And of course it was easier to have no tuition fees in a Britain that had a far smaller amount of students. It would be highly costly not to have any form of contribution by students.
Of course modern American and British tuition fees are too high, but scrapping them altogether doesn't seem reasonable to me either. There is no such thing as a free lunch, and it seems best that both the government (i.e. the tax payer) and the student contribute some share to the student's education.
