I would invest a few days or weeks and write a detailed and precision spec. Then you can work with freelancers. The biggest risk is scope creep because it sours relationships quickly. If you invest the time to write a spec, there is far less risk. A spec is a narrative and a list of specific screens and functions. I have run a dev shop for 10 years and can help you with a spec if you're interested.
Buffalo is a undergoing a downtown Renaissance and has cheap real estate and a lot of technical talent being under utilized by banking Java applications. Come here you'll get great talent, great food, great culture, nys tax breaks, cheap real estate.
It's a private institution. So long as it doesn't accept public money or break any discrimination laws, it should be allowed to keep its admission process private. Does anyone honestly think George bush was admitted because of his grades? Let's find something meaningful to be outraged about. We are never going to win this one and it's not worth fighting.
It's definitely not solved from a technical perspective but it's really hard to compete in a business perspective. The market wants good fast search. If you come up with great fast search, it's still hard. The only opportunity I see from the business perspective is to challenge the visual paradigm. Having said that, there are tons of opportunities from the academic perspective such as inferring context, letting users control context, etc.
I am a business school graduate. It's a little shocking to read this but also hard to argue. I think many degrees have no value except for serving as a requirement for entry into a career.