This is a little like asking "how to kill the school", "how to kill the hospital", "how to kill the fire brigade".<p>Universities are defined by national legislation and regulation and are (in most countries) largely government supported, even where there are student fees (underwritten by government-backed loans). Most of those same governments are aware that these institutions are keystone employers in their cities and have very deep links into the economy, to the point that they often co-invest in new campuses.<p>Articles like these tend to get written by computer scientists who think "but people can study from anywhere so surely you can set up a university from your bedroom" who haven't looked at the stats and seen that a sizeable proportion of student degrees (education, nursing, medicine, etc) are ones in which the government also regulates the jobs you get afterwards.<p>Private providers have a stigma of being incredibly suspect because of dodgy practices that have been engaged in in the past. Such as offering potential students gifts (e.g. free laptops) to enrol in courses they are not in a position to study so that the provider can collect the government contribution towards student fees. The upshot of which is that if you're a university, you get to be "self-accrediting" (for the sake of academic freedom and because practically the government can beat you with a stick any time you do the wrong thing because not only do they control your funding, they also directly appoint several members of your governing council) whereas if you are a private provider, you are at much greater regulatory risk because <i>another</i> private provider could do something dodgy causing new regulations to come in hampering your business.<p>There are certainly many interesting and profitable businesses to run in the higher education space, but if your goal is to "kill the university" you're almost certainly doomed before you've started, because you are not playing in a free market; you are playing in the proportion of the market the government of the day chooses to make open to private competition. Political realities are that is never going to be "all of it".<p>Caveat: posting from an Australian context, but though the mechanisms are different, around the world the situation appears to be similar. Higher education is not run as a free market, has tight regulations, and significant government investment.