This 22-year-old startup founder got his college to pay him $200,000: 'Sometimes, you just have to ask'
It's no secret that college in the United States is expensive — about 43 million people live with student debt and the outstanding federal student loan balance stands at about $1.8 trillion, according to the Education Data Initiative.
But startup founder Emil Barr says everything is negotiable — even your college tuition.
In fact, on top of successfully negotiating with his school administration to cover about $60,000 of his tuition fees, the 22-year-old startup founder made more than $140,000 over the four-year period that he was enrolled, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
By the time he graduated, Barr had been paid over $200,000 by Miami University.
He said he learned the art of negotiation through his experience as an entrepreneur.
During his freshman year at Miami University, Barr built his first startup, a social media marketing agency called Step Up Social.
He entered university with a scholarship that covered only part of his tuition. By his sophomore year, Barr used his entrepreneurial experience as leverage and convinced his school administration to fund the rest of his tuition
At the time, he said, the university was making a concerted effort to attract more donors, and as part of that, was focused on developing and strengthening its entrepreneurship program on campus.
"[But] the one downside is there weren't that many student-run businesses at the college for them to talk about," he said. As a result, Barr said, he often spent time speaking with donors they brought on campus, as well as with the university press outlet.
"Towards the end of my second year at Miami, that's when we really started to have these conversations, because the business had gone somewhere. We had done over a million dollars in revenue," Barr said.
"So I sat down with the dean, and I was like: 'Look ... I'm spending a lot of time doing this. I feel like I'm [creating] a lot of value for the school, and yet I'm still paying for [some of] my own tuition and working side jobs to try to make that happen," Barr said.
In December 2022, he negotiated a financial package that fully covered his tuition.
Barr also won multiple on-campus startup pitch competitions and student grants which earned him more than $30,000 throughout his time at the university, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
By the time his junior year rolled around, Barr had also brought on the university as a client of his business. In total, he made over $100,000 in revenue through the university's contracts with Step Up Social.
But one of his "crowning accomplishments," Barr said, was not the financial payouts — but instead being the only student on campus who was given a faculty parking pass.
"I fought for that for nine months ... people still joke about it, because I was so determined," he said.
Step Up Social has since acquired and rebranded to Candid Network, an online marketing agency specializing in user-generated content. Barr said he's in the process of selling the business.
While it's become trendy for startup founders to drop out of school to build their businesses full-time, Barr found a way to stay enrolled — and profit from it, all while building a business from the ground up. One skill that has helped him over the years is learning how to ask for things.
"What [I] learned is a lot of the things that people are scared to ask for — really, you can get them. Sometimes, you just have to ask," Barr said.
He said a big part of negotiation is simply finding out what is valuable to the other side, and adjusting from there. "I think that so often people just assume," he said. Instead of guessing, he suggested being genuine and asking the other side what they want to get out of the situation.
"Everyone always has an angle or an end game, which sounds a little bit cynical. I think that a way you [can] overcome that cynicism is just ask: 'What would make you happy?' And then you have a starting point," Barr said.
He graduated from Miami University in 2024 and is set to join Stanford's Graduate School of Business as a deferred admit in September 2027.
Today, Barr also runs the workforce development platform Flashpass, a business he co-founded in 2022. Flashpass brought in $1 million in revenue in 2024 and another $1 million year-to-date, according to documents reviewed by CNBC Make It.
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