Much has been written on the corporatization of American higher education, the defunding of public universities, and the broader neoliberal project that turned students into customers and faculty into precarious contract labor. However, far less has been said about how the university has ceased to exist as a self-sustaining institution. The modern campus is no longer a community of administrators, students, scholars, and staff united under the umbrella of a discrete organization. Instead, the campus is a nexus of outsourced labor and private contracts, with corporate vendors now running many of its most basic operations.

Once upon a time, bookstores and dining halls were directly staffed and operated by the university in-house. Now chains like Barnes & Noble and Follett run many bookstores, treating public institutions like high-traffic shopping plazas. Aramark and Sodexo operate dining services, despite student protests over their ties to the prison-industrial complex. Financial and record-keeping services, once housed on campus, have since been outsourced to Ellucian, Oracle, Workday, and SAP. Even the work of student success, once the domain of professors, advisers, and peers, is now mediated through assessment and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. These platforms are often rebranded versions of corporate tools originally designed to track sales pipelines. One only needs to look at Salesforce’s entry into higher education as an example of the trajectory.

The use of contractors and the shift to the cloud create barriers to labor organizing. There are fewer secretaries and people working in the bursars’ and registrars’ office, while the custodians and maintenance workers are employed by separate entities altogether. This atomization carves up the shop floor where solidarity can be built or in some cases eliminates it entirely. For universities’ top managers, outsourcing is cost-effective and logistically convenient: the institution no longer has to handle benefits, payroll taxes, training, or other overhead. But most convenient of all is that the university no longer has a relationship with or obligation to the worker.

The treadmill of technology explains this endless push for outsourcing. Private vendors have taken advantage of the move away from paper records toward digitized alternatives, swooping in with offers to handle exam scores, grades, parking tickets, and athlete status. University administrators insist that universities must constantly adopt new, expensive systems to remain competitive. Despite diminishing returns, schools are locked in never-ending cycles of dependency as well as increased debt to bond issuers if enrollment drops.

As institutions compete for the same pool of students, they rely more and more on data brokers. Recruitment is guided by expensive data lists purchased from the College Board or ACT, with consulting firms like Educational Advisory Board (EAB) and Ruffalo Noel Levitz (RNL) promising “tuition optimization” strategies straight out of the corporate playbook. Solicitation of alumni donations is even outsourced to virtual engagement officers produced by Givzey. At the same time, these vendors are also pressured by the AI hype to offer ever-more-advanced and expensive programs to universities.

Meanwhile dining halls now host Burger King, Chick-fil-a, and Starbucks, giving the appearance of a dazzling array of student choices while funneling money into a small handful of conglomerates. Similarly student information systems often carry cutesy mascot-inspired names, obscuring the fact that they are little more than products from companies like Ellucian or Oracle.

What looks like university infrastructure is, in fact, an elaborate corporate skin graft. Underneath higher education is governed by contracts, licensing fees, and proprietary systems. It is increasingly difficult to know who owns what.

Of course, the classroom is not immune. Universities have long relied on underpaid graduate students and adjunct faculty to handle teaching, but now we’re seeing the outsourcing of courses to Grow with Google or companies like Sophia Learning and StraighterLine. For the remaining college courses, the production of accessible materials may involve services like Anthology Ally or YuJa.

The expansion of AI also threatens to displace mental health counselors, tutors, and librarians. This is in addition to the very high costs of journal bundles from publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, Sage, and Springer — all of which are also invested in AI. Major textbook publishers such as Pearson tout the ways in which AI can enhance student success. Perhaps what exemplifies the contradictions most is that universities are now simultaneously paying Turnitin to police plagiarism with AI-detection tools and OpenAI for institutional access to ChatGPT.

Resistance is not absent. Students have organized campaigns against corporate dining giants; for example, Ithaca College ended its relationship with Sodexo in 2019. Kent State broke ties with Aramark in 2021, bringing dining back in-house. Dining service workers have begun unionizing, drawing connections between their exploitation and broader struggles. Faculty and librarians at the University of California forced journal publisher Elsevier to the bargaining table in 2019, showing that effective pushback is possible. These are small but significant reminders that the university is not doomed to permanent privatization.

Still, the trajectory is clear. The more universities cede their core functions to corporations, the more difficult it is for them to fulfill their mission as public institutions of higher learning. Instead they become a mesh of contracts, licensing platforms, and revenue streams. In this way, the neoliberal university is not like a corporation, as successful companies would be hesitant to sell themselves off piece by piece.

If American higher education survives this moment, we need to consider what kind of university we want. We will need more than just better funding. We need to get off this treadmill.