This made me think about transparency as part of the public mission. If students believe they’re buying an education from a public university, but a private company is changing recruitment, course design, and data use, then how the “public” is seen becomes kind of misleading. It’s like privatization that wears a university mask.

When public systems fail, people don’t get a public fix, they get a personal fundraiser. And it changes the mindset, you start thinking education is something you have to beg for, not something society is responsible for. It also makes inequity worse because fundraising success depends on networks, popularity, and luck. Here is what this program is: (https://www.gofundme.com/)

This connects back to the land acknowledgement in a different way. It explains that privatization can be like a way of control, with outsiders running community institutions “through their lens.” That made me think about who makes up SFU’s priorities, is it students/community needs, or corporate partnerships, donors, etc.

This shows that the public pay twice, where the public resource gets extracted, packaged, and then resold. That is similar to paywalled research where public funds research, then the public has to pay again to read it. It also makes “public mission” feel like a survival problem.

This is one of the darkest examples because it shows privatization doesn’t just “provide a service” and it can change human relationships to make money. The public mission of universities is also about human relationships like mentorship and community. If universities outsource too much of the learning experience, do we basically lose the “face-to-face” parts that actually make education helpful?

This is such a brutal example of how “choice” gets weaponized. They explain inequality like it’s a lifestyle preference, when it’s usually about money, age, disability, or just being excluded. In Metro Vancouver, this is like how public services increasingly assume you have a phone, data, apps, accounts, when public infrastructure is supposed to work even if you don’t.

This line feels like the thesis in one sentence. It’s basically saying, there are some things that shouldn’t become someone’s profit stream. It made me think about whether knowledge is like that too, like, can you “sell the public way” of learning by turning it into paywalls, tuition spikes, or corporate platforms?

The “win-win” language is so real because that’s exactly how privatization is always sold, efficiency and savings. But the story sets up the twist, the “win” gets uneven over time. It shows how public institutions (including universities) can get pulled into deals that sound harmless, until you see the long-term costs and who actually benefits.