The student owns what he comes up with, profitable or not, The schools would lose a lot of income were it were otherwise.

The article is referring to faculty members (i.e., employees of the company) whose ideas would prove profitable to the university. Something about bringing various staff members down to, or up to, a level playing field in the school.

Faculty members would keep 90 percent of the first 20,000 pounds ($30,000) their idea makes, a share that declines as the profits increase, down to a third of income above 100,000 pounds ($150,000).



“It’s killing the goose that lays the golden eggs,” said Ross Anderson, a computer science don leading the fight against the plan. “The university will ... have its hand in our pocket, and it’s outrageous.”





The question you pose was raised at DeVry when I attended. The response was that there were a lot of little geniuses whose finals projects with DeVry proved amazingly profitable, once the little bugs were later worked out (seen the commercial about the self-cleaning cat-box?), and the proceeds go directly to the company the students create to improve and market their inventions. With permission, DeVry merely uses these geek-toys in the advertisement of the school’s own success story.

Dan