"There are people ready for business school sooner than others, but they have to realize that they won't come out of business school with the same opportunity and offers," Sullivan says.

And not only the entrenched hiring traditions of financial firms and the students who will work for them defy Harvard's possible initiative. Although Laidlaw says he predicts a trend toward more diverse business school classrooms, tha trend has apparently not yet arrived.

Other business schools seem skeptical, at best, about the prospects for admitting undergraduates directly into their MBA programs.

Donald P. Jacobs, dean of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, says his school rarely admits candidates without at least two years of work experience.

"It's better to take them with experience, and the only reason I would change is if we don't get the quality students we want or if the number of applicants decreases dramatically," he says. "But this year [the number of applicants is] up very strongly."

According to Jacobs, Kellogg has not accepted and candidates directly out of college for two years. "Every year we have people tell us they want to go directly to business school and we tell them to go elsewhere where they will accept people directly out of college," he says. "There are more [schools] that do than say they do."

The Stanford School of Management also has a strong preference for students with work experience, says Associate Dean for Academic Affairs Jerry I. Porras.

Even the occasional few who are accepted directly out of college are advised to get work experience first, he says.

Porras says that accepting students directly out of college creates complications for class-room dynamics. "If the person has work experience, they grasp the material faster," he says. "It could create a much more difficult teaching process."

No plans are in the works to admit more students right out of college, Porras says.

Only one business school contacted, the Yale School of Organization and Management, is experimenting with an admissions shift like the one HBS is considering.

Admissions Dean Richard A. Silverman of the Yale School of Organization and Management, however, says the school has been experimenting with accepting more MBA candidates right out of college.

"In the last three or four years, our average age of the class has been going down a little bit because we've consciously admitted a few more younger people to see how it goes," he says. "We've taken a little bit of a chance in that regard, and it's a good ideal to bring younger people in as long as it's under control and the class is still very experienced."

But Silverman says the school continues to favor those with experience and the move will not lead to a policy change to admit more students directly from college.

He says, however, that students who have had significant extracurricular leadership roles and entrepreneurship experiences in college add an interesting perspective to business school classes.

"There is something to that argument," he says. "But we haven't felt the need to look or extreme ways to try to increase diversity."