How can your core mission be education but "you're optimizing for profit?" Either your core mission is education or it isn't.
I feel like this is the kind of goal setting miss I see businesses make all the time. They'll be doing be doing some version of the ubiquitous value setting activity, and as ideas are pitched someone will be like "wait, isn't our most basic value to just make money?" Sure, whatever, but what does that tell us? A distraction. If money is really so important, just remember the story of the new CEO of iirc a failing iron production business that repeatedly answered the board's questions on how he'll turn profit with "we're going to be the safest iron production business in America." The goal was achieved by fostering a culture of transparency, adopting new technology like emails for internal flat hierarchy communication, etc, and it did become the safest, but also highly profitable.
Persuit of profit alone justifies short term behavior constantly. The firing of 20% of your workforce could be seen as justifiable when your goal is persuit of profit.
Basically I think it's wrong to try to go cross eyed having "persuit of profit" always there while also trying to set some other "idealistic" goal. Just stay focused!