The SOC project might be worthwile from the point of view of the students gaining experience, but from what I have heard there has been a mixed reaction to the results from the projects they have been working on. Are there any metrics showing the net benefit (or otherwise) to the projects and the relative cost in supervision & reworking code (ie, we got equivalent productivity of say 0.7 of the mentors normal productivity for the time spent mentoring) and how many of the students went on to continue contributing to that or another open source project?