People also forget how recent that shift was and just how brittle the reasoning behind it is.

while technically non-profits, they are absolutely profit focused, as are the people in control of them

So, coming from a country where universities are either non-profit or owned by the state… how does this work? Like, surely Harvard isn’t paying anyone dividends? It’s not actually a literal for-profit entity, is it?

Basically the only thing a US nonprofit can't do is give dividends to investors. The nonprofit has to funnel any unspent profit to itself as an endowment, but can also have obscenely high salaries for administrative staff.