This article attempts a critique of the private institutions in higher education by examining how they realise three concepts of access, choice and equity to form a distinct discourse of education. Using techniques of substitution and false logic in their arguments, democratic language is appropriated by such institutions as a kind of co-option technique, high on rhetoric but perhaps leaving behind the very real issues that privatisation in general purports to overcome, and creating some new ones of their own. This, ironically, may also succeed in blurring the distinction between public and private institutions, and nullify the basis on which they have entered education.
