Summary. Michigan State University’s Burgess Institute for Entrepreneurship and Innovation replaced reading about business with building one: 350 MSU students launched businesses on Whop, part of roughly 4,000 student businesses across university programs. Ken Szymusiak, the institute’s Managing Director of Operations, runs it. If you teach entrepreneurship, run an incubator, or sponsor a student program, this is the mechanism.
What the Burgess Institute was doing before Whop
The write-up describes the standard curriculum problem. Students read cases, wrote plans and finished the semester without having made a product, found a customer or taken a payment. Michigan State is ranked eighth on the Princeton Review’s top 50 undergraduate entrepreneurship list, so this was not a weak program; it was a program built around study rather than building.
What changed on Whop
The assignment became “build a whop.” A student creates a storefront, sells something, and manages real payments as coursework. The university has its own page on Whop where student businesses live, and Whopathons, time-boxed competitions, compress the launch into days.
Szymusiak’s framing of what he was trying to prove: “My whole goal with this project was to try to show my class that it was easy to get started and offer value to the world.” And on what he has seen since: “What has become very clear over the past two years is that my students now have the ability to build at superhuman speed.”
The same pattern runs elsewhere. A 25-day sprint at USC produced 29 student founders, Georgia Tech ran an 8-day Whopathon, and the University at Buffalo ran a 3-week incubator.
The numbers
Whop reports 350 MSU students launching businesses, about 4,000 student businesses through university initiatives, 249 universities visited and nearly 100 university pages claimed. It does not report student revenue, how many businesses survived the semester, or what MSU pays, if anything. The 40% of college students with side hustles is an article-cited industry figure.
What I would tell an educator to copy
Grade the receipt, not the plan. A student who sold one thing to one stranger learned more than a student who wrote 40 pages. If your program cannot show a payment, it is teaching reading.
Make the proof public and named. 350 launches is a number; ten students with a storefront, a customer and a first-month figure is proof a parent, a donor or a journalist can check. One canonical page per cohort, updated each semester.
Measure the program the way you would measure a business. Google Analytics 4 and Tag Manager on the university page, with the first sale firing as a conversion event, tell you which assignment produced revenue and which produced slides.
Then put a Dollar-a-Day boost behind the student story that already got engagement. Recruiting for next semester is a marketing problem, and the proof is the ad.
Who this is not for
Whop is a checkout, storefront, course and community layer, not a learning management system or a gradebook; the institution still owns the curriculum. The base rate is 2.7% + 30¢, 20 basis points under Stripe’s 2.9% + 30¢, and the optional layers, managed tax at 2%, orchestration at 0.8% and billing at 0.5%, can push the stack above Stripe. Financing requires $30,000 processed from 10 or more customers in 90 days and a dispute rate under 2%, and it is unavailable to gambling, sports betting, trading signals, credit offers and adult categories. Student businesses at these price points will not touch financing, and a university sponsoring the program should budget the base rate on student sales, which the students pay, not the school.
If you were going to use Whop anyway
If you were going to sign up for Whop anyway, sign up through my link, dennisyu.com/go/whop, or send me your business name and email and I will submit the referral. Whop pays me a share of its profit on your account; your rate is the same 2.7% + 30¢ either way. In return my team at Local Service Spotlight sets up the AI agents that audit your public reputation, fix what they find, and keep it maintained: a personal brand analysis, Google Analytics 4, Tag Manager and Search Console with conversion events that actually fire, a Content Factory that turns one recording into a definitive article, clips and posts, and a weekly Metrics, Analysis, Action report. That is the work we normally charge education businesses for.
Source and disclosure
This story is retold from Whop’s own write-up, How Michigan State University is using Whop to redefine entrepreneurship curriculum in higher education (2026-02-19, modified 2026-02-25), which you should read in full. I am a Whop partner and earn a share of Whop’s profit from businesses that sign up through my link. Whop did not pay for or review this article. See Whop for universities and student founders for the other education stories and my full notes on what Whop costs, and my main Whop page for the partner program.