Peter Thiel recently offered to invest in the first shipsteading venture, Blueseed.
I'm in the SF Bay now, but I watched Michael's intro in a Seasteading Town Hall online meeting, and I'd recommend me Vancouver rationalists hearties to get the story straight from buccaneer Michael's mouth.
Strictly, only manufacturing and distribution of controlled substances is subject to the Maritime Drug Law Enforcement Act, but we don't want to take unnecessary risks at this stage. Incremental approach.
According to O. Shane Balloun's excellently referenced paper to which Hyena linked, a seastead/shipstead just outside the contiguous zone (24 nautical miles offshore), which does not exploit natural resources, and has a zero-tolerance illegal drug policy, will enjoy little interference from Coast Guard.
There are many other challenges ahead, and we don't have Thiel's investment, but it is launching such a shipstead off the SF Bay Area that two former Seasteading Institute employees and I are working on at Blueseed.
I think there's a 4th type of value that students derive, implicitly, from courses that involve physical participation, especially: personal connections. Often these last well beyond the class, and many prominent businesses have been built by people who met in college.
Instructor aspects that would predict a student body likely to be a good pool of connections include assigning group tasks, encouraging peer-to-peer communication (e.g. debates, playing devil's advocate), organizing field trips, and borrowing from the corporate world: team-building exercises and outings in general.