[hkmurakami]

Given that student pitch-a-thons (ex: business plan competition type events) can earn you pretty decent amounts of money, how much longer till hackathons on college campuses fall the way of corporate hackathons?

As food for thought, there are "Consulting Case Competitions" for business school students year round, and some students decide to spend their time optimizing for winning a bunch of these one after another all around the country. I'm not sure if this is a good, bad, or neutral thing.

[TimFogarty]

I go to a lot of student hackathons and I really don't see that happening. And the large majority of organizers are heavily focused on creating a welcoming event for building, learning, and having fun.

Student hackathons are and always will be fundamentally different from corporate hackathons because the motivations of the organizers and attendees are different. Perhaps we should be careful about offering large prizes for the reason you state but the focus is very clearly on learning and building and that's not set to change.