I'm most surprised by "Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE".

FSAE teams can run out of a spare room in an engineering dept's basement with a 5- to low-6-figure budget. I'm not intimately familiar with the hyperloop proposal, but hazarding a guess here, I can't really imagine a team putting together a hyperloop pod on less than a million dollar budget, and the facilities needs would be greatly increased as well. Getting any competitors would be really impressive and would require pretty heavy corporate sponsorship.