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I'm on the University end of the University/High School collaboration. Usually, we can only provide personnel. We usually don't have enough money to actually support the high school aspect of the team (although we usually can finance our own travel expenses). We also are limited in the amount of machining support we can provide (given that we have to fight with Formula 1 for the use of the machine shop and they own the after hours insurance).
That basically leaves us providing mentors. Surprisingly, this works out well. We generally have a number of FIRST veterans on the team (some of us having been in FIRST since the 1v1v1 days). The level of experience is always useful as well as the fact that it's different experience from everyone else. Now, as to why you'd want college students as mentors, the main advantage is that college students are a good bridge between the engineers and the high school students. The engineers tend to relate better to the college students and the high school students tend to relate better to the college students. Frequently, we end up making sure that the high school students know what's going on and that they stay involved in the project. College students also are frequently willing to put more hours into the project than engineers are (mainly because they don't have families waiting at home). So there are many advantages to it. But don't expect money or machining as that's frequently hard to come by (although obviously not unheard of).
Matt
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