Privilege escalation: Meta media causus

Privilege escalation is the act of exploiting a bug in an application to gain access to resources which normally would have been protected from an application or user. The result is that the application performs actions with a higher security context than intended by the application developer or system administrator. Privilege escalation occurs when an application with high privileges has flawed assumptions about how it will be used.
(from wikipedia.org)

What could privilege escalation, a concept mainly used in the context of system administration, mean in the context of universities or other educational institutions?