First: You have to distinguish between learning stuff (which can be done mostly freely or at least in a rather cheap way) and getting social recognition for it (the latter is why you go to college and pay masses of money for tuition).

Thus: You don't have to pay a lot for education but for getting social recognition for it.

Otherwise: I admit that in Germany, university is nearly tuition-free. I only bought few textbooks, since many of them were either available in the library or the lecture notes were pretty good. If no "official" lecture notes were available, students often agreed that everybody TeXes notes for one week to make an unofficial student-made lecture notes.

Thus: Yes, some money was spent, but there are options to keep the spending down.