UBC has some fairly large dorms, presumably for first year students who are from more remote parts of BC (or other provinces or other countries) who are not within commuting range, though its location does put a substantial part of the BC population in commuting range. Location within large population centres puts many of the major Canadian universities in commute range of a substantial part of the population.
While that may be true to some extent, a more important factor is the size of these universities relative to the national population. University of Toronto has about 73k undergraduates, while Canada has about 36 million people. So 1 out of 493 people in Canada is a University of Toronto undergraduate. In contrast, Harvard has about 7k (College) or 10k (including Extension School) undergraduates, while the US has about 328 million people, which means that about 1 out of about 47k people is a Harvard College undergraduate, and about 1 out of 33k is a Harvard (including Extension School) undergraduate.
So University of Toronto does not have any need to be super selective in terms of trying to distinguish between numerous applicants who are showing near-maximum ordinary academic stats, and it is also much more accessible to a wider swath of Canadian high school graduates, compared to Harvard.
China and India do have large populations, so “rest of the world” necessarily includes them (especially on a population-weighted basis). However, most on these forums would probably not want to use them as a model, given the extreme competitiveness for the most desired universities (at least in part due to the large national populations, and also due to university prestige obsession), and the use of a single standardized test to determine competitive admission ranking. Note that both countries also have lower percentages of the population with bachelor’s degrees than the US.
Some of the other country examples may not fit the models you are looking for. For example, Germany starts tracking students into university-bound versus non-university vocational tracks starting relatively early (what would be middle school age in the US).
What you are probably looking for is the state of state university growth, broad access, and low cost in the US from the 1950s to the 1980s, but presumably without the limitations that minorities and women faced then (particularly in the earlier part of the era).
Regarding the apparently bits of health care discussion floating around here, there is some linkage to educational costs. Because the US traditionally uses employers to purchase health care insurance for employees, the ever increasing cost of health care is a disincentive against hiring more regular employees (particularly at lower or moderate pay levels), as opposed to part time contractors without health care insurance benefits. Of course, one of the contributors to higher health care costs is that health care workers need high pay for their professions to be financially doable after going into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for their education.
