Tag: Greed

  • The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

    The Link Between Greed and Efficiency

    In the mythology of American capitalism, “efficiency” is the magic word that justifies austerity for workers, rising tuition for students, and ever-expanding wealth for administrators, financiers, and institutional elites. It is framed as neutral, technocratic, and rational. In reality, efficiency in higher education has become inseparable from greed, functioning as a mask for extraction and consolidation.

    Universities and their sprawling medical centers have become some of the largest landowners and employers in the cities they inhabit. As Devarian Baldwin has shown, these institutions operate as urban empires, expanding aggressively into surrounding neighborhoods, raising housing costs, displacing long-time residents, and reshaping cities to suit institutional priorities. University medical centers, nominally nonprofit, consolidate smaller hospitals, close services deemed unprofitable, and charge some of the highest healthcare prices in the nation. These operations are justified as efficiency or economic development, yet they often destabilize the communities they claim to serve.

    Endowments, some exceeding fifty billion dollars at elite institutions, have become central to this dynamic. Managed like hedge funds, these pools of capital are heavily invested in private equity, venture capital, real estate, and derivatives. The financial logic of endowment management now shapes university priorities, shifting focus from public service and learning to capital accumulation, investor returns, and risk management. Efficiency is defined not by educational outcomes but by the growth of financial assets.

    This culture of extraction has been amplified by decades of government austerity. Public funding for higher education has steadily declined since the 1980s, forcing institutions to behave like corporations. At the same time, the aging Baby Boomer generation is creating unprecedented financial pressures on Social Security, Medicare, and healthcare systems, leaving public coffers stretched thin and reinforcing a winner-take-all national mentality. In this environment, universities compete fiercely for students, research dollars, donors, and prestige, producing conditions ripe for exploitation.

    Outsourcing has become a standard method to achieve “efficiency.” Universities frequently contract out food service, custodial work, IT, housing management, and security. Workers employed by these contractors often face lower wages, fewer benefits, and higher turnover, while administrators present these arrangements as cost-saving measures. Meanwhile, administrative layers within institutions continue to expand, creating a managerial class that oversees growth and strategy while teaching budgets shrink. As Marc Bousquet has argued, the corporate-style management model displaces faculty governance and treats students and staff as revenue streams rather than participants in a shared educational mission.

    The adjunctification of the faculty exemplifies efficiency as exploitation. Contingent instructors now teach the majority of classes in American higher education, earning poverty-level wages without benefits while juggling multiple teaching sites. Institutions call this “flexibility” and “cost containment,” but in reality it transfers value from instruction to administrative overhead, athletics, real estate, and financial operations, all while reducing the quality of education and undermining academic continuity.

    The rise of Online Program Managers, or OPMs, further illustrates the fusion of greed and efficiency. These companies design, manage, and market entire online degree programs, often taking forty to seventy percent of tuition revenue. While presented as efficiency partners, OPMs aggressively recruit students, inflate costs, and minimize academic oversight. Their business model mirrors the exploitative strategies of for-profit colleges, which pioneered high-cost, low-quality instruction combined with heavy marketing to capture federal loan dollars. The collapse of chains such as Corinthian, ITT, and EDMC left millions of borrowers with debt and no degree, yet the model persists inside nonprofit universities through OPMs and algorithm-driven online programs.

    “Robocolleges” represent the latest evolution of this trend. AI-driven instruction, predictive analytics, automated grading, and digital tutoring promise unprecedented efficiency, but they often replace human educators, reduce pedagogical oversight, exploit student data, and prioritize enrollment growth over educational quality. Efficiency here serves the financial bottom line rather than the learning or well-being of students.

    The result of these extractive practices is a national crisis of student debt, now exceeding one trillion dollars. Students borrow to cover skyrocketing tuition, outsourced services, underpaid instruction, and the costs of programs shaped by OPMs or automated platforms. Debt is not an accident of the system; it is the intended outcome, a mechanism for transferring public resources and student labor into private profit.

    The broader social context intensifies the problem. Higher education exists in a winner-take-all, financialized society, where resources flow upward and the majority of people are told to compete harder, work longer, and borrow more. Universities have internalized this ideology, acting as both symbols and engines of extraction. Efficiency, under this paradigm, is defined not by the effectiveness of teaching or research but by the expansion of institutional power, wealth, and influence.

    True efficiency would look very different. It would invest in educators rather than contractors, stabilize academic labor rather than exploit it, serve surrounding communities rather than displace them, expand learning opportunities rather than debt, and prioritize democratic governance over corporate-style hierarchy. Efficiency should measure how well institutions serve the public good, not how well they protect endowment returns, OPM profits, or administrative salaries.

    Until such a redefinition occurs, efficiency will remain one of the most powerful tools of extraction in American higher education, a rhetorical justification for greed disguised as rational management.

    Sources

    Devarian Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower

    Marc Bousquet, How the University Works

    Tressie McMillan Cottom, Lower Ed

    Christopher Newfield, The Great Mistake

    Sara Goldrick-Rab, Paying the Price

    Government reports on for-profit colleges, student debt, and OPMs

    Research on higher education financialization, outsourcing, and austerity policies

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  • When American Greed is the Norm

    When American Greed is the Norm

    Greed is no longer a sin in America—it’s a system. It’s a curriculum. It’s a badge of success. In the American higher education marketplace, greed is not the exception. It’s the norm.

    We see it in the bloated salaries of university presidents who deliver austerity to everyone but themselves. We see it in billion-dollar endowments hoarded like dragon’s gold while students drown in debt. We see it in the metastasizing ranks of middlemen—consultants, online program managers, enrollment optimization firms—who profit off the dreams and desperation of working-class families.

    But greed in American higher education is more than a few bad actors or golden parachutes. It is institutionalized, normalized, and weaponized.

    The Student as Customer, the Campus as Marketplace

    It began with the rebranding of education as a “return on investment,” a transaction rather than a transformation. The purpose of college was no longer to liberate the mind but to monetize the degree.

    By the 1990s, under bipartisan neoliberal consensus, public colleges were defunded and forced to adopt the private sector’s logic: cut costs, raise prices, sell more. Tuition rose. Debt exploded. The ranks of administrators swelled while faculty were downsized and adjunctified. The market had spoken.

    But even that wasn’t enough. A generation of edu-preneurs emerged—Silicon Valley-funded disruptors, for-profit college chains, and online program managers—who turned learning into a scalable commodity. Robocolleges like Southern New Hampshire University, Purdue Global, and the University of Phoenix began operating more like tech platforms than institutions of thought.

    The result? Diploma mills at the front end and collection agencies at the back.

    Greed in the Name of God and Country

    Greed doesn’t always look like Wall Street. Sometimes it wears the face of morality. Religious colleges, some of them under the protection of nonprofit status, have become breeding grounds for political operatives and ideological grooming—while raking in millions through taxpayer-funded financial aid.

    Liberty University, Grand Canyon University, and a host of lesser-known Bible colleges operate under a warped theology of prosperity, turning salvation into a subscription plan. Meanwhile, they push anti-democratic ideologies and funnel money toward political causes far removed from the mission of education.

    Accreditation as a Shell Game

    The accreditors—the supposed watchdogs of educational quality—have been largely asleep at the wheel or complicit. When greed is the norm, accountability is an inconvenience. For-profit schools regularly reinvent themselves as nonprofits. Online program managers operate in regulatory gray zones. Mergers and acquisitions disguise collapse as growth.

    Accreditation agencies rubber-stamp it all, as long as the paperwork is tidy and the lobbyists are well-compensated.

    Debt as Discipline

    More than 43 million Americans carry federal student loan debt. Many will never escape it. This debt is not just financial—it’s ideological. It keeps the workforce compliant. It disciplines dissent. It renders critical thought a luxury.

    And those who push for debt relief? They are met with moral lectures about personal responsibility—from the same lawmakers who handed trillions to banks, defense contractors, and fossil fuel companies.

    Silicon Valley’s Hungry Mouth

    The new frontier of greed is AI. Tech giants like Google, Amazon Web Services, and Meta are embedding themselves deeper into education—not to empower learning, but to extract data, monetize behavior, and deepen surveillance. Every click, every quiz, every attendance record is a monetizable moment.

    Universities, starved for funding and afraid of obsolescence, are selling access to students in exchange for access to cloud infrastructure and algorithmic tools they barely understand.

    Greed Isn’t Broken—It’s Working as Designed

    In this system, who wins? Not students. Not faculty. Not society.

    The winners are those who turn knowledge into a commodity, compliance into virtue, and inequality into inevitability. Those who build castles from the bones of public education, then retreat behind walls of donor-backed endowments and think tanks. The winners are few. But they write the rules.

    A Different Future Is Possible

    If American greed is the norm, then what remains of education’s soul must be found in the margins—in the community college professor working three jobs. In the librarian defending open access. In the adjunct organizing a union. In the students refusing to be pawns in someone else’s game.

    The antidote to greed is not charity—it’s solidarity.

    Until justice is funded as well as football. Until learning is valued more than branding. Until access is more than a talking point on a donor brochure—then greed will remain not just a sin, but a system.

    Sources

    • U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics

    • The Century Foundation, “The OPM Industry: Profits Over Students” (2023)

    • Chronicle of Higher Education, “Administrative Bloat and the Adjunct Crisis”

    • IRS Nonprofit Filings, Liberty University and Grand Canyon University

    • Debt Collective, “The State of Student Debt” (2025)

    • Public records and audits of Title IV institutions, 2022–2024

    • Higher Education Inquirer archives

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