Other societies do this in a somewhat different form.
While they may provide far less inequitable funding for colleges and allow for free/low tuition, there’s also the fact colleges are much more selective not only in terms of admissions, but also through much more aggressive tracking so only the top quarter to half of the society’s students are eligible to even compete for college admissions.
Everyone else is placed onto various vocational/apprenticeship tracks or expected to start working…sometimes as early as the end of middle school.
This factor is one reason it irks me that so many American posters ignorantly assume free college == open admissions as that’s far from the case with nearly every system I’ve known of which offers free/extremely nominal cost college tuition.
In fact, my impression is open admissions has only been practiced in the US and by Mainland China during the 10-year long Cultural Revolution. Everyone else including other Com bloc countries made university/college admissions exceedingly selective through highly selective admissions and aggressive K-12 tracking so only the academically top portion of their classes are even in the college applicant pool.
One illustration of this…how several Russian/Eastern European friends who were only qualified for higher vocational tracks* which would have lead them to career/educational paths considered lower than the academic university track in their societies of origin ended up excelling in and graduating from top 50 or better US colleges with flying colors mostly in STEM or STEM/non-STEM double majors.
- This includes highly competitive STEM-centered high schools meant to prepare students to enter and graduate from the Soviet/Russian armed forces equivalent of the Federal Service Academies. And unlike the FSAs here which are regarded as university level institutions, many other armed forces military academies tend to be regarded more akin to higher vocational schools, not equivalent to universities.