Well the important thing to remember is that generating bitcoins will get more difficult to mine over time so mining bitcoins is only a short-term business. However, I am not sure how that will work out over the long-term especially if the price of bitcoins goes up in value year over year.
What you need to do is track all your costs like a hawk (ie. meter the electricity usage by the rig). You also need to live in a location that has cheap electricity + cold climate. So I would suggest some place where it snows. Try to go as high altitude as possible, far north or south. If possible, place your rigs outside to reduce cooling costs.
You want to run your rigs 24/7/365. Forget the college class- you won't have the time especially if your friend is going to be investing 100k.
When you generate BTC, don't just sell it ASAP on the markets, price it high so you get maximum return.
Once again, the important thing is to track your costs, including depreciation of your equipment. Saying, "I paid 7$ for electricity per bitcoin and sold the bitcoin for 8$ and made a 1$ profit" is not going to cut it.
As far as where to invest the profit from the business I'd go for physical silver/gold and stocks, primarily dividend stocks.
Good advice. Yes, we've considered the equipment maint. and my partner will be building custom cooling mechanisms for the rigs. We've also calculated the electricity usage of each rig so we have a decent formula for mining which we obviously just update with current bitcoin values and up to date difficulty factors.
Also, I'm not just talking mining and buying bitcoins. Out of the 3 of us, 1 is a good programmer/developer, I am basically half programmer and half business developer and the other is a great business guy and awesome promoter to the best levels of just about any business. So we have a solid group and I am also thinking to bring aboard my cousin who is an advanced forex guy. So I guess what I am getting at is that we're also thinking outside the realm of just mining and investing into coins, but also considering our resources, we can do many things and already have some nice ideas. So any additional ideas maybe for a commerce site you guys would like to see developed around bitcoin users? (ie. auctions, classifieds, etc).