The "resources" are going to be located on planets, planetoids, moons, and asteroids. (The void separating them is very empty - on the order of one hydrogen atom per cc.) That means going there, along with the necessary heavy equipment, mining and concentrating the resource in a nasty, deadly environment then shipping it either back to earth or to an established space colony (good luck on building those).

The cost of those operations versus the value of just about any material makes such operations prohibitively expensive. Plus, we have exactly zero experience living, let along mining, on any celestial body other than this one. It's going to take decades to obtain that experience with great expense in lives and treasure and that assumes that the government can muster the willingness to follow through on a long, expensive learning curve.

I'm sorry but the whole thing sounds like a gambit by the university to get naive folks and alumni to contribute more money.

Back in the 50s they told us we would all have flying cars by now. The current hysteria of building a colony on Mars in the near future is an even sillier concept. Mining the solar system is even farther out there.