On Monday, student organizers announced that Columbia University’s board of trustees had voted to divest from the private prison industry, a victory for the nearly two-year campaign led by the student group Columbia Prison Divest.

The vote mandates that the university sell its 220,000 shares in G4s, a British prison and security services company that operates prisons across the world and provides equipment for Israeli-run checkpoints in occupied Palestine. Furthermore, Columbia has pledged never to invest its $8 billion–plus endowment in other private prison corporations like Corrections Corporation of America in which, according to student estimates, the school had $8 million worth of shares as of June 2013.

These investments, it should be said, are a drop in the bucket for an industry that brings in roughly $3 billion in revenue annually by operating prisons, jails, and holding facilities for undocumented immigrants. Students argue their campaign was not intended to make a huge dent in the profit margins of these corporations, but instead to increase awareness of the industry, and mass incarceration more broadly.