Colleagues of mine at a local university often have students work on projects that get used by various departments. Nothing as big as a registration system, but data reporting UIs, data collection forms, etc. Usually paired with a senior staff member, it gives the students some hands on experience, and helps the dev dept get a bit more done (in theory - in practice, not always).

Taking the OP at face value, someone saying "build us a version of this" doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility, but again... whatever was demoed is already MIT. Absolutely no reason the school itself couldn't build on that (inhouse or out-sourcing).