The Venture Studio University
What happens when you merge the venture studio model with experiential education?
Picture two graduation ceremonies, five years apart.
In the first, a business student crosses the stage having completed an entrepreneurship concentration. She wrote a detailed business plan, analyzed case studies, and earned an A in her capstone course. She accepts a consulting job where she’ll advise companies on strategies she’s never actually executed.
In the second, a computer science student graduates as the CEO of a software company generating $400,000 in annual recurring revenue. She spent her freshman year conducting customer interviews for seniors working their capstone project, her sophomore year building product features, her junior year leading the engineering team, and her senior year launching her own venture with studio support. Her capstone wasn’t theoretical. It was a functioning business with paying customers.
Both students received accredited four-year degrees. Both paid similar tuition. Both invested equivalent time and effort. The difference isn’t in the students, it’s in expansion of the institutional model. One university chose to integrate venture building into its educational core. The other maintained the traditional approach. Neither choice is inherently wrong, but the outcomes diverge significantly. For universities seeking to differentiate themselves, strengthen their financial position, or offer students genuinely distinctive preparation for entrepreneurial careers, the studio model represents an opportunity worth serious exploration.
Higher education faces a perfect storm of existential threats. Enrollment is declining due to visa changes, fewer high school graduates are applying, and the demographic cliff is looming according to a recent CNBC article “‘A perfect storm’ — more colleges at risk as enrollment falls and financial pressures mount.” Tuition resistance grows as families question the value proposition of $200,000 degrees. Endowments struggle to generate returns sufficient to offset operational costs. Meanwhile, the best entrepreneurial talent increasingly bypasses traditional education entirely, following the Thiel Fellowship path straight into company building.
At the same time, an entirely separate trend has matured: venture studios are proving that company building can be systematized. MIT’s venture studio, Protolabs, brings deeply technical entrepreneurs in to MIT labs to find IP worth building companies around, starting them, and spinning them out to the broader MIT innovation ecosystem. Oxford Sciences Enterprises has built a portfolio worth over $3 billion from university research. NLC Health and MDB Capital have demonstrated repeatable success in specialized domains. These aren’t anomalies. They’re proof that the studio model works.
Yet almost no one is asking the obvious question: What if these aren’t separate trends but a solution hiding in plain sight?
Universities don’t need to choose between financial sustainability and educational relevance. They need to become venture studios.
The Broken Status Quo
Higher education’s crisis manifests in three interconnected failures, each reinforcing the others.
The educational relevance crisis is perhaps most visible. Despite soaring tuition costs, graduates consistently lack the practical skills employers value most. “Entrepreneurship” gets taught in classrooms utterly disconnected from actual venture building. Students analyze case studies of companies they’ll never build, learn frameworks they’ll never apply, and graduate with theoretical knowledge but zero operational muscle memory. Internships provide observation opportunities, not ownership. A student might spend a summer at a startup, but they’re watching, not building. They leave with bullet points for their resume, not scar tissue from real decisions. A 2024 Hult/Workplace Intelligence survey found that 89 % of HR leaders avoid hiring recent college graduates due to lack of experience, while 85 % of recent graduates say their degree did not prepare them for work; only 24 % of U.S. graduates feel they have the skills needed for their roles.
The financial sustainability crisis compounds these educational shortcomings. Traditional university revenue models are buckling under multiple pressures simultaneously. Endowment returns can’t keep pace with operational cost inflation. Research grants grow more competitive as federal funding stagnates. State support for public universities continues its decades long decline. The result: universities become increasingly tuition dependent precisely when families are most resistant to paying premium prices for uncertain outcomes.
Meanwhile, a talent development crisis undermines the university’s historic role as launchpad for innovation. The best entrepreneurial minds increasingly skip traditional education entirely. The Thiel Fellowship explicitly pays students to drop out. Y Combinator accepts founders straight from high school. The implicit message resonates: if you’re serious about building something, university will slow you down, not speed you up. Universities risk becoming finishing schools for mid-tier corporate jobs rather than engines of innovation.
The common thread connecting these failures: universities have become observers of innovation rather than engines of it. They study entrepreneurship rather than practice it. They house research that sits in journals rather than becomes the foundation of operating businesses. They produce graduates who can analyze disruption but not create it.
This didn’t happen because universities lack smart people or meaningful resources. It happened because the fundamental model separated learning from doing, theory from practice, education from value creation. The question is whether that separation is necessary or merely habitual.
The Hidden Blueprint: What Kettering University Proved
Before imagining what universities could become, it’s worth examining what one already proved possible.
Kettering University in Flint, Michigan operates on a radically different model than traditional higher education. Every student must complete two and a half years of work experience to graduate, not as summer internships, but integrated into the core academic structure. The university runs on a quarter system where half the student body attends classes while the other half works at employer sites. Every three months, they switch. Students don’t just observe the professional world; they’re embedded in it.
The mandatory thesis requirement completes the model. Students must deliver a project that generates tangible value for their employer, often measurable cost savings or revenue generation. The thesis isn’t theoretical exploration; it’s proof of capability. Employers don’t humor these projects out of charity; they rely on them. Students graduate having already demonstrated they can identify problems, develop solutions, and deliver results in real organizational contexts.
The model produces several powerful effects. Work experience transforms classroom learning from abstract to applied. Students often challenge professors, asking for examples of when what they are being tough will be used in the real world and in the jobs they are already working. The grounding in real world problems makes students better learners, not worse ones.
Reciprocally, students become better employees. They ask better questions in the classroom because they’ve faced real problems in the field. They challenge assumptions because they’ve seen which theories survive contact with reality. The constant rotation between work and study creates a feedback loop that neither traditional universities nor pure work experience can match.
The employer validation through the thesis requirement provides something even more valuable than good grades: proof of capability. Employers know exactly what they’re getting because they’ve watched these students operate for years. Kettering graduates aren’t unknown quantities. They’re proven performers.
Yet for all its innovation, the Kettering model has a fundamental limitation. It relies on external employers. Students gain experience within established corporate systems. They learn to operate inside existing organizations, not to build new ones. The university captures educational value, better learning outcomes, strong placement rates, but not economic upside from student output.
Kettering University is not the only university that requires work experience to graduate. Wentworth Institute of Technology and Antioch College both require multiple semesters of work experience to graduate. The Universities of Louisville, Toledo, and Cincinnati all have mandatory coop programs within their engineering programs. Drexel, Northeastern, and NJIT all offer co-op programs as well, but do not require them. Universally, students that take advantage of co-op programs graduate more employable, but not necessarily entrepreneurial.
This raises an intriguing question: What if the “employer” wasn’t an external company but a portfolio of ventures the university helps create? What if instead of sending students to work at employers like General Motors, the university launched ventures where students progressed from support roles to leadership positions to founders?
What if universities didn’t just teach entrepreneurship but systematically practiced it?
The Venture Studio University Model
The ‘studio university’ merges the Kettering model’s experiential rigor with the venture studio’s company building infrastructure. Rather than sending students to external employers, the university operates its own portfolio of Venture studios where students gain progressively greater responsibility across their undergraduate journey.
The four year progression creates a systematic path from observer to builder.
Freshmen enter as support staff for existing studio ventures. They conduct customer research, analyze data, and handle operational tasks. They’re not designing strategy or making major decisions. They’re learning how ventures actually operate by proximity to real stakes. They sit in on pitch meetings, watch senior students negotiate with customers, see how founders respond when experiments fail. The learning happens through immersion, not lecture.
Sophomore year transitions students into specialized functional roles aligned with their academic focus. Engineering students build product features. Business students develop go to market strategies. Design students craft user experiences. They’re not just contributing. They’re responsible for defined outcomes within active ventures. The studio provides structure and oversight, but sophomores own their domains. When a feature ships or a campaign launches, it’s their work in the market, not a simulation.
Junior year elevates students to leadership positions within scaling ventures. They lead entire functional areas; heading engineering teams, owning entire product lines, managing partnerships. They participate in the studio’s ideation processes, evaluating new venture concepts and contributing to portfolio strategy. By this stage, they’re operating at a level that would typically require years of post graduate experience. They’re not practicing leadership; they’re exercising it.
Senior year culminates in the founder role. Students launch their own venture as their capstone project, supported by studio infrastructure. The studio provides initial capital, operational support, legal framework, and access to expert advisors. The thesis requirement mirrors Kettering’s: demonstrate product market fit, revenue traction, or a clearly defined path to sustainability. Success isn’t measured by unicorn potential. It’s measured by building something real that solves real problems for real customers.
Academic coursework integrates directly with venture challenges throughout this progression. A sophomore studying product management doesn’t analyze theoretical case studies. They workshop actual product decisions they’ll implement that quarter. A junior studying organizational behavior doesn’t write papers about team dynamics. They navigate actual team conflicts and document their approach. Faculty evolve from lecturers to coaches, from knowledge transmitters to expert advisors solving problems alongside students.
The studio portfolio strategy aligns with the university’s academic strengths rather than chasing fashionable sectors. An engineering focused school builds deep tech ventures. A business school might focus on B2B software. A medical school could launch health tech ventures. The university leverages its research as an IP pipeline and builds ventures that can operate with undergraduate talent supported by expert oversight.
This isn’t about building any company anywhere. It’s about building specific types of companies that align with institutional expertise and can genuinely benefit from the undergraduate talent model.
The Economic Engine
The studio university’s financial model requires abandoning venture capital’s obsession with unicorns. This isn’t just about hunting billion dollar exits. It’s about building across the range from sustainable businesses that generate cash flow through to unicorns.
Understanding this distinction is critical. Traditional venture capital optimizes for power law returns: the top one percent of investments must return the entire fund because most investments fail completely. This model works for professional investors that diversify across multiple asset classes, but makes no sense for a university studio where there is a need for both predictable, growing income streams to cover university operations, and for students to pursue entrepreneurship that is meaningful for them. The studio university builds a diversified portfolio of sustainable businesses across three revenue streams.
Profit distributions from operating companies provide the primary engine delivering liquid returns quickly. A well run software business generates 30-40% profit margins. A specialized consulting firm or professional services business produces steady cash flow. Manufacturing businesses with defensible IP can distribute meaningful dividends. Unlike venture capital returns that require exits, profit distributions begin the moment a venture achieves profitability. A company generating $2 million in annual revenue with 35% margins can distribute $700,000 annually to stakeholders, including the university. Assume a 30% ownership for providing startup capital, support, and facilities, each such company would distribute $210,000 back to the university annually.
Scale this across a portfolio. If a university launches 500 profitable cash flow focused ventures per year, and even a third reach meaningful profitability within three years, that’s 165 companies distributing cash created annually. The math compounds quickly. A mature annual cohort of 165 profitable companies, each distributing an average of $210,000 annually to the university, generates $43.6 million in income to the university. This is comparable to returns from a $400 million endowment, but derived from businesses the university built rather than market performance it can’t control.
PE and M&A focused ventures provide a middle path between cashflow stability and unicorn moonshots. These companies target $10-30M exits within 3-5 years, the sweet spot for private equity buyers and strategic acquirers seeking proven business models ready to scale. If a university launches 500 PE/M&A focused ventures annually with a 30% exit rate by year four, that’s 150 successful exits per cohort. At an average exit value of $15 million with 30% university ownership, each exit returns $4.5 million. A single mature cohort generates $675 million in exit proceeds. The model tolerates a 70% failure rate because winners more than compensate and, unlike unicorn hunting, success doesn’t depend on outlier outcomes. This tier of the portfolio balances risk and return with time to liquidity providing stronger returns without requiring a decade or more for each cohort to mature. Unicorn focused ventures complete the portfolio strategy. Acknowledging that pursuing unicorns provides three core values. 1) unicorn opportunities attract top entrepreneurial talent, 2) the branding value is substantial, and 3) some opportunities justify a higher risk tolerance. If a university launches 200 high potential ventures annually targeting billion dollar outcomes, historical venture performance suggests roughly 1% will reach unicorn status—two companies per cohort. The path dilutes university ownership significantly: starting from 30% at founding, each of six follow-on funding rounds dilutes by approximately 20%, reducing the university’s stake to 7.86% by the time the company reaches $1 billion valuation. A single unicorn exit at that level returns $78.6 million to the university; more than an entire annual cohort of cashflow companies. Two unicorns from a single cohort would generate $157.2 million, albeit often more than a decade from founding.
The blended approach means the studio doesn’t depend on unicorn outcomes to justify its existence, but captures extraordinary returns when they materialize. Cashflow companies deliver more stable consistent returns almost immediately, PE and M&A exits provide lumpy returns in the medium term, and unicorn track companies deliver strong returns a decade or more out. The objective of the economic engine is building a blend of businesses that throw off cash, are primed for PE or M&A exits, or on trajectories to become unicorns. Creating a diversified entrepreneurial investment portfolio. A living endowment created by the students, university, and ecosystem working together.
Most importantly, students gain exposure to the full spectrum of company building approaches: capital efficient businesses, strategic exit paths, and moonshot opportunities. Preparing them for whatever entrepreneurial path they ultimately pursue.
Ecosystem value creates multiplier effects beyond direct financial returns. Alumni who built companies as undergraduates become more engaged donors. They’re not just proud of their alma mater; they own equity in its portfolio. The campus attracts top talent seeking entrepreneurial paths, improving student quality and selectivity. The research agenda stays cutting edge through constant market feedback. Faculty don’t wonder if their work matters; they see it commercialized in real time. Successful ventures often remain near campus, creating regional economic development that attracts more resources to the area.
The studio university isn’t trying to replace its endowment. It’s building a parallel economic engine that compounds over time. Early ventures fund later ventures. Successful founders mentor new student cohorts. The portfolio diversifies risk while the studio infrastructure improves with each cycle.
This is how universities become genuinely self sustaining: not by growing tuition or chasing donors, but by building valuable things and capturing a meaningful share of that value.
Addressing the Obvious Concerns
Any model this different from the status quo raises immediate objections. Most are worth taking seriously.
“Isn’t this just exploiting student labor?” The concern reflects appropriate skepticism about power imbalances between institutions and students. But compare the studio university to existing alternatives. In traditional universities, students pay tuition for theoretical knowledge with no economic participation in what they create. In unpaid internships (still common across industries), students provide free labor to established companies in exchange for resume credentials. The studio university inverts this: students receive accredited education, equity ownership in ventures they build, and paid operational experience they can immediately leverage to secure employment after graduation.
Two critical safeguards: 1) student work must be paid and compensated mirroring market standards, and 2) students must graduate regardless of venture outcomes. Their degree cannot depend on whether their senior thesis company succeeds. Academic success and venture success are parallel tracks, not dependent variables. If a senior’s venture fails, they still graduate. They simply graduate having learned what most MBAs never do. How companies actually die, and why.
The university’s economic interest aligns with student success rather than extraction. The university profits when students build valuable companies, not when it extracts maximum labor for minimum compensation. Students who build successful ventures become the studio’s best recruiting tools, its most generous alumni donors, and its most credible validators. Exploitation would undermine the model’s core value proposition.
“What about studio complexity?” The scale and diversity of this model raises legitimate operational questions. Building 1,200 ventures annually across three distinct trajectories, cashflow businesses, PE/M&A exits, and unicorns, requires fundamentally different capabilities. Cashflow companies optimize for early profitability and sustainable margins. PE/M&A targeted ventures need growth playbooks that balance burn rate against traction metrics strategic buyers value. Unicorn path companies demand expertise in venture fundraising and hypergrowth scaling. These aren’t superficial differences. They’re distinct operational models requiring different mentor networks, capital deployment strategies, and success metrics.
The studio must develop track specific infrastructure: separate expert advisors for each path, distinct evaluation frameworks for allocating companies to tracks, and leadership capable of pattern matching across hundreds of ventures to identify which need intervention. This isn’t a boutique studio launching 10 carefully curated companies per year. It’s an industrial scale company creation engine.
The volume challenge is substantial, but manageable. At full scale, if a university has a senior class of 2,000 students, this model implies launching 500-1,000 new ventures annually. The studio support model must leverage expertise: leaders train teams rather than do the work, systematized playbooks guide execution, and tiered intervention focuses intensive support on struggling or high potential companies. A core team of perhaps 30-50 experienced operators serves as track leads and functional experts for each core track, supported by successful alumni founders as mentors. Universities already operate at this scale for athletics, research labs, and clinical programs. The studio applies similar operational principles to venture building.
“What about academic rigor?” Teaching hospitals prove this concern misunderstands how learning works. Medical students in teaching hospitals face life and death stakes while still learning. The intensity doesn’t compromise their education, it accelerates it. Theoretical knowledge sticks when students immediately apply it. Pattern recognition develops faster when students encounter real cases rather than simulated ones. Faculty don’t just transmit knowledge; they coach students through actual challenges, making the education more rigorous, not less.
Applied context makes theoretical knowledge more durable, not more shallow. A student who learns financial modeling to value their own venture retains it better than one who completes problem sets for a grade. A student who studies organizational behavior while leading an actual team develops judgment that case studies can’t replicate. Research becomes more relevant when connected to real ventures. Faculty don’t wonder if anyone will use their work; they see it implemented and can measure outcomes.
“Can undergraduates really build successful companies?” This question makes a category error. Undergraduates aren’t building companies alone. They’re building within a studio that provides expert operators, proven processes, and capital. The student contributes founder energy, domain insight from their field of study, and execution capacity. The studio provides operational infrastructure, mentor networks, and the judgment that comes from pattern recognition across dozens of ventures.
Many successful founders started young. Gates and Zuckerberg launched their companies as undergraduates, but without support systems. The studio university gives students the structure they lacked while preserving the energy and risk tolerance that make young founders effective. Success isn’t defined narrowly as building unicorns. It’s building sustainable businesses that solve real problems and generate genuine value. By that measure, undergraduates supported by expert infrastructure are entirely capable.
The proof already exists in adjacent models. Undergraduate research assistants contribute meaningfully to faculty projects that advance human knowledge. Student built capstone projects in engineering programs sometimes get commercialized. Athletic programs extract extraordinary performance from 18-22 year olds under expert coaching. The studio university simply extends this proven logic to venture building.
The Venture Studio Opportunity for Universities
Higher education isn’t broken; it’s evolving. Universities face real pressures: demographic shifts, changing student expectations, financial constraints, and questions about relevance in a rapidly transforming economy. But these pressures don’t demand a single response. Different institutions will find different paths forward, and that’s appropriate.
For universities seeking new models, particularly those wanting to strengthen their financial position, differentiate their offerings, or deepen their commitment to experiential learning. The venture studio model offers a compelling opportunity worth serious exploration.
The beauty of this approach is its modularity and flexibility. A university doesn’t need to convert its entire operation or abandon its core mission. The studio model is additive, not replacement.
Begin with a single venture studio focused on your institution’s strongest domain. Whether that’s engineering, healthcare, business, design, or something else entirely. Launch with a pilot cohort of 20-30 students. Measure outcomes rigorously: student learning, career placement, venture success, faculty satisfaction. Learn what works in your specific context. Scale what succeeds. Adjust what doesn’t.
University presidents and boards: You have remarkable assets, infrastructure, talent, research capacity, patient capital, and convening power. The studio model offers a way to leverage these assets to create new value streams while simultaneously providing students with genuinely distinctive preparation. It’s worth exploring whether this makes sense for your institution’s specific context and goals.
Students: If you’re drawn to entrepreneurship, you shouldn’t have to choose between education and company building. Look for institutions experimenting with models that make you a builder, not just a credentialed job applicant. When you choose where to study, ask about experiential opportunities and how the curriculum connects to real venture creation.
Faculty: The studio model elevates rather than diminishes academic expertise. You’re not performers lecturing to passive audiences. You’re master practitioners coaching the next generation through actual challenges. Your research doesn’t gather dust; it becomes the foundation of operating businesses whose outcomes you can measure. If this resonates with how you want to practice your craft, advocate for exploration at your institution.
MIT’s Protolabs, Oxford Sciences Enterprises, and others have demonstrated this works in university contexts. Experiential education’s effectiveness is documented across fields from medicine to engineering to skilled trades. The technology infrastructure exists. Student demand is clear. The economic pressures are real.
The question isn’t whether universities must adopt this model—they don’t. The question is whether your institution wants to explore it, whether this approach aligns with your mission and context, and whether you’re curious about what becomes possible when you systematically integrate venture building into education.
For some universities, this will be transformative. For others, different paths will prove more appropriate. Both outcomes are legitimate.
But if you’re intrigued by the possibility of producing graduates who build rather than just join, of capturing value from your institution’s innovation, of offering something genuinely distinctive in an increasingly competitive landscape—this model deserves your serious attention.
The venture studio university isn’t the only future for higher education. But for institutions facing the challenges and opportunities described in this paper, it represents one compelling path worth exploring.
Citations:
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/30/colleges-at-risk.html
https://newsletter.venturestudioforum.org/p/the-four-customer-challenge-for-venture
https://newsletter.venturestudioforum.org/p/the-university-venture-studio-unlocking
https://newsletter.venturestudioforum.org/p/the-quality-first-revolution
This article is part of a series of articles exploring how the venture studio model can be organized to fit purpose, ecosystem, and capabilities. These articles are meant to inspire future venture studio creation, policy makers, ecosystem shapers, and investors. The power of the venture studio model lies in its flexibility in how it can be organized to create economic value. These musings are based on Matt Burris’s review of over 500 venture studios globally and his work designing, building, and operating venture studios as part of the 9point8 Collective.