ABSTRACT This paper revisits the concept of ‘data colonialism’ and its critiques, suggesting a reframed conceptual framework tailored to interrogating and resisting data colonialism in the context of higher education, with the aim of advancing decolonial insights. Theorising data colonialism needs to move beyond simply identifying processes of data extractivism – e.g., how global university rankings and citation indexes are used to shape education policy, teaching and learning – towards a holistic project of decolonising higher education. A decolonial project that entails datafication interrupts both data extraction and data dispossession at all levels of higher education institutions – from the assessment methods of teaching, learning and research to student recruitment processes and so on. The analysis in this paper contributes to existing scholarship on datafication in higher education by paying explicit attention to the epistemic violence that is reproduced through data-dependent technologies and data practices and discussing how this violence may be counteracted.