It's important to note that Sanders' plan only provides for states to offer free tuition and fees at the state universities. In many states room and board is more expensive than tuition and fees, and Sanders does not address that. A program aimed at 2-year schools avoids the housing question, since 2-year schools rely more on a commuting student population.
We could offer free university for all, but doing so would dramatically alter what the "college experience" that we Americans make such a fetish of looks like.
Europeans go to university for free, but the whole affair looks very different. You're probably going to stay in the city where you grew up and live with your parents or live in an apartment with roommates not proximate to school. Your social life won't revolve around school. Campuses are rather spartan and don't have multimillion dollar fitness centers and 50,000 seat athletic stadiums. And consequently, you won't strongly identify as an alumnus of that institution later in life. Most people outside the US really don't care all that much about where they or anyone else went to college after it's over. They find our tendency to join alumni clubs and put bumper stickers on our cars quite strange - why would you care so much about something you did when you were practically still a child?
The American model - large colleges that are often located in small towns where nothing else is, everyone living on or near campus, social life inextricably linked to school, an expectation to continue to be involved with the school later in life by donating money and following the sports teams - isn't affordable or practical if the taxpayer is picking up the tab for everything.
There's also the fact that there's a much broader variance in quality/reputation of universities in the US than there is in Europe and Asia. There really are no Continental European equivalents of Harvard or Princeton, but they also don't have bottom-of-the-barrel regional state universities or our HBCU system that has a troubled history of its own. If universities are free, it's harder to translate "quality" because tuition has been removed from the equation. (Even in state university systems here, the flagship school generally has higher tuition than the less-selective satellite campuses.)
Sorbonne, Heidelberg, Göttingen.
Also, lots of European countries have universities located in small/smallish university cities, that dominates the city and attract students from far away. Lund and Uppsala in Sweden are examples.
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