I’ve stumbled upon this article from Jacobin (on Facebook) about how universities in the US have opened their arms to corporate greed – transforming campuses into hubs of outsourced labor and private contracts.
The piece highlights how core university functions—bookstores, dining halls, student records, and even teaching—are increasingly managed by corporations like Barnes & Noble, Aramark, and Salesforce, prioritizing cost-cutting over community and labor solidarity.
This shift, driven by the push for digital systems and AI, fragments workers, undermines the university’s public mission, and locks institutions into costly vendor dependencies. While resistance, like student campaigns and unionization efforts, shows some success—such as Ithaca College and Kent State bringing dining back in-house—the trend toward privatization threatens the essence of higher education, turning universities into meshes of contracts and revenue streams rather than self-sustaining institutions.
Institutions must have money coming in and money coming out. Given that the enrollment rates seems to suggest a downward trend since 2010 and even more so after 2024.
With the advancement of technology and 4.0 industrialization with integrated AI, lot of the jobs we knew from the fields of Liberal Arts and Design are being eliminated and obsolete.
We’ll discuss the unemployment rates all around the world in another post but the tightening inflation without government incentives to help resolve the burden of student debt or living costs alone depreciated the value of holding a degree.
It’s truly an era where the universities and colleges have to rely on conglomerates and practice capitalism to stay afloat in the age where degrees don’t mean much anymore.
