Bursaries seems like a reasonable approach... Companies fund the students in fields that they have a shortage of candidates...
Giving free education to thousands of students in fields that have no shortage of candidates for very few jobs (Philosophy, Political science, etc...) is a waste of money and of the student's time. (In many cases those students would likely be much better of with non-university technical qualifications - there is a huge shortage of skilled artisans)
(There are a place for some candidates in almost all fields (i.e. philosophy lecturers for a base in other fields and the rest of the philosophy graduates make excellent bartenders 😉), but the intake levels should not be several orders of magnitude more than the demand)
Yes, technology can reduce the cost of education. The other thing that would help a lot is if some money is spent on developing and maintaining textbooks under open licenses - you can likely pay authors more than the current royalties that they get after everyone took their cut to write books under something like a CC-BY-SA license, which can be provided free of charge to student electronically, and hard copies can be sold for the cost of materials and printing. (This makes more sense to initially do at school level, where the potential pool of authors are larger (and cheaper))