Keeping the business may be to your advantage. Stipends at graduate schools are often around $25k/year, so your business would allow you to make the same amoun

Keeping the business may be to your advantage. Stipends at graduate schools are often around $25k/year, so your business would allow you to make the same amount of money with almost no effort. Since they are often funded out of professors' grants, you're limited to working with professors who have funding and have to do their research. If you keep the business and fund yourself, you'd basically be able to go to grad school almost anywhere you wanted and do research in whatever area you wanted with almost anyone.