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
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U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics
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The Century Foundation, “The OPM Industry: Profits Over Students” (2023)
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Chronicle of Higher Education, “Administrative Bloat and the Adjunct Crisis”
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IRS Nonprofit Filings, Liberty University and Grand Canyon University
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Debt Collective, “The State of Student Debt” (2025)
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Public records and audits of Title IV institutions, 2022–2024
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Higher Education Inquirer archives
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