This paper argues that the idea that tertiary education in New Zealand is a public good has been inhibited by extreme policies that treat education as a commodity and the education sector as a market. Education is about producing highly skilled, knowledgeable and useful citizens and the notion of a 'profit' is in 'creating educated citizens' (TEU, 2018). While governments have promoted tertiary education as a core public good, it is not what these same governments have emphasised. In fact, if access to tertiary education by Maori is anything to go on, quite the opposite has been the reality.