You said the motivation was "profit" which means that the owners of the organization make money that they can go spend on themselves as they please. This literally does not happen for the vast majority of universities.

What you are describing is more like "growth." And maybe the kinds of growth universities are investing in isn't great right now. That's a fine conversation to have.

This isn't just a semantic distinction. The profit motive and the kind of empire building growth motive are two pretty different things. You can see this because there ARE for-profit universities in the US and they act in dramatically different ways than the non-profits.