I'd like to add that right now an even more important discussion in Chile is about the quality of higher education. After the educational laws were modified in the 1980s in order to allow the existence of private universities and technical institutes, many for-profit institutions appeared, even though educational profit is forbidden (institutes found obscure ways to achieve this). A direct consequence of those for-profit institutions was a constant decrease in the quality of higher education, at expenses of overcrowding classrooms or hiring bad professors. People against this new reform argues that government's money should be expended first by fixing the bad-quality the educational system has, and after that is solved, to fund higher education students.
Private universities in Chile devised tactics inspired on Hollywood accounting to extract profits: for example they don't own the buildings and pay hefty rents to landlords who are shell corporations of the owners.
It doesn't really make sense to forbid profit in education (at least the way the Chilean government does it). The best universities in the world make a lot of money (e.g. Harvard, MIT, Stanford). Opening the educational market should create competition and drive quality up. Of course the market should be regulated, but forbidding profit is not really the way to go.
Not sure how me not being smart is relevant to the discussion. I would say you are not very polite, however that still doesn't add to the discussion here.
Top (and rich) universities, like Harvard, MIT, etc, have an endowment which invests donations (and pretty much most of their money), in companies and funds, which would not be allowed under Chilean law.
Additionally, I would argue the idea is not to re-invest in the institution, but to invest the university money in a way that is financially sustainable and in line with the university goals. Spending all the money on infrastructure might not be the best way to achieve that.
