"Free education"? It is the most expensive form of education available.
Online bachelors degrees will become available for $10,000 (or inflation-adjusted equivalent) for many online-only topics. You won't have tens of thousand of students/year dropping out per year with no degree and $50-100K of debt that they are unequipped to pay off. Many will opt to bypass degrees entirely if they know there is a job/career available via a skill-based certication model.
No doubt there will be a huge number of people clinging to their institutional power, but those institutions will become more and more irrelevant and crumble beneath their feet.
Think of how many industries have been disrupted and have had to adapt to new models due to the internet. People are looking for a quality secondary education at a reasonable price. There is no rule saying that the current university system will remain the primary tool to deliver it.
Well, "free" doesn't mean government pays. Someone pays the teacher.
The model I had in mind was that it could be free to the consumer. Or it could be paid curriculum that students buy. It wouldn't have to be formal. Anyone with knowledge on a subject could post their course content on YouTube, and if it tends to help people pass their certifications, a lot of people would tend to watch it. Content providers would make their money like anyone on youtube. Ad revenue or a third party crowd funding platform. That model separates the process of learning from the credentials certifying that you're competent. It doesn't matter how you learn. It matters that you learn enough to get your certifications.