Deborah A. Bussiere

I’m thinking of doing a series for the newsletter that’s all about how health care companies make money. There’s such a black box around this topic. We speak vaguely about it (e.g. “sell to payers”) without any detail. And the detail is everything. Would you read it?

A New Model for Education: The Startup University Our current education system is failing to prepare students for the real world. Students spend years cramming information that they rarely use, only to graduate without any practical job skills and loaded with student debt. The startup university offers an alternative model that prioritizes hands-on learning, real-world application, and entrepreneurial thinking. The model is inspired by the success of Y Combinator and the Thiel Fellowship. At the core of the startup university is apprenticeship - pairing classroom lessons with practical experience. Imagine learning accounting while setting up bookkeeping for a startup. Or mastering marketing through running social media for a small business. Classes provide the theoretical grounding in the morning, while nights and weekends are spent applying those lessons through real-world projects. There are no extracurriculars - the singular focus is building a minimum viable product that solves a real need. Rather than abstract assignments, students focus on launching an actual startup business (or joining existing startup businesses on campus). They compete to recruit talent against peers. If you can't mobilize a team, you join another startup. The goal is to "graduate" quickly into a profitable business, earning equity stakes for both the student and the university. This model creates tight links between education and industry. Corporate partners provide startup ideas, mentorship, and potential acquisitions. They get early access to talent and invest in the most promising ventures. The application process focuses on the business idea itself - students form teams organically based on shared interests. Courses teach only skills needed for current projects. The emphasis is practical learning over abstract knowledge. Even failure is built into the model, as most startups will not succeed. Students get to run multiple ventures during their training, learning resilience and agility. The university can also offer cookie-cutter business models or projects - running the cafeteria, supporting the endowment, or acquiring real estate - to provide low-risk entrepreneurial experience with supervision. Industry benefits as well. Industry can sponsor the incubation of projects. Operators can provide periodic guidance and mentorship. Industry sponsors might have the right to poach talent, on voluntary arrangement at any time - greatly increasing the opportunity for hiring strong talent. In this way, students are always graduating. In other ways, students that start successful businesses might not graduate in a conventional sense. They might be building and running successful businesses that continue to tap the university ecosystem for learning and young talent. By senior year, presumably there are dozens of such self-sustaining businesses running and now bringing new students on-board in a continuous loop... The startup university reimagines higher education as a training ground for real-world impact. Students graduate with tangible business ventures, entrepreneurial skills, and professional networks. This type of learning format maximizes the rate of human capital development and American entrepreneurship. One can offer many variations to this approach based on local needs. What do you think?