Here’s a story about a university willing to reduce your tuition costs for a small stake in your small business. Might be an interesting model to export to other schools.

Startup Swap: University Offers Tuition for Stake in Business

An upstate New York university is doing more than investing in students. It’s investing in their startups. In lieu of tuition, Clarkson University in Potsdam, NY, is offering young entrepreneurs with established businesses the chance to attend the school through a combination of financial aid and selling a portion of their business to the school. “We take a very small equity stake each semester,” Marc Compeau, director of Clarkson’s Center for Entrepreneurship, told BusinessNewsDaily. “This way, the university has some skin in the game.” As members of the program, Compeau said students are offered office space on campus for their businesses, as well as mentoring advice from the school’s faculty and alumni on how to grow and expand their ventures. With a mission centered on building the economy though small businesses and young entrepreneurs, Compeau believes the program, and its goals of capitalizing on students’ entrepreneurial spirit and encouraging investment in future leaders, is a perfect fit for the school’s Center for Entrepreneurship. Each of the program’s participants, Compeau said, signs a contract with Clarkson after negotiating a final tuition bill and ownership stake agreement with the Center for Entrepreneurship. Once the student graduates, he added, there are multiple opportunities for both parties to shift full stake in the business back to the student. The university started the program this year with its first student, 18-year-old Matthew Turcotte. He has been running his own Web-based development firm, North Shore Solutions, since he was a junior in high school. “This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I feel fortunate that I attend a university that is as passionate about my business as I am and is so supportive,” Turcotte said in a press release from the college. The goal, Compeau said, is to have about five students in next year’s program — which in turn can help prompt other students to consider running their own businesses. “They will be able to pass on some of their experiences (to their peers) in the classroom,” he said. Clarkson’s Center for Entrepreneurship provides counsel throughout the entrepreneurs’ undergraduate experience and identifies resources within the university and community that will help develop students’ skills, technical innovations and networks into commercial opportunities.

http://www.businessnewsdaily.com/startup-investment-clarkson-1273/

@Jack,

Re: Jericho. Great show. The show actually did come back for a (truncated) 2nd season, which I think was 7 episodes. It gave the show-makers a chance to wrap things up to some degree, but it was very rushed. Still–worth a viewing (and available on DVD).

On Growing Apples:
Before Michael Pollan wrote The Omnivore’s Dilemma or In Defense of Food, he wrote The Botany Of Desire. This was written in four parts, each on a plant that satisified a human desire. The four plants were potatoes, tulips, marijuna, and apples. From this book I learned that if you plant an apple seed, the tree you eventually get will be an apple tree but will NOT be an exact replica of the parents. It might have some of the same characteristics but it does not grow “true” to the variety of either parent and only rarely is the outcome something that is desirable to humans. For this reason, if you want a red delicious or granny smith apple tree, you can only get that from a graft of the original tree, not from seed. This was confirmed for me by the owner of an apple orchard. I don’t know if this applys to other types of fruit trees.

I recomend reading this book as it is very interesting and gives one something to think about with regards to the human-plant connection.

Jericho also came back with a comic book series from Devil Due Comics. The art was pretty good, and I like a gimmick they used. Each issue has the inside cover page withe the Jericho logo and morse code. If you decipher the morse code it was a clue about the next issue.