On the Boston end of the Weeks Footbridge, a red-brick monument to the future of graduate education at Harvard sits swathed in scaffolding.

When it opens next year, the Harvard Business School's (HBS) Executive Education Housing Facility will be 96,000 square feet of living space for "mid-career" students--middle-aged, successful college graduates looking to be rejuvenated and reeducated before heading back into the real world.

HBS's executive education programs are the best-known and most expensive--including $40,500 for one ten-week course--of these programs at Harvard. But nearly every graduate school is expanding their own mid-career offerings this year, targeting audiences from school principals at the Graduate School of Education (GSE) to military leaders at the Kennedy School of Government (KSG).

In fact, President Neil L. Rudenstine says the expansion of mid-career programs is at the top of his list of priorities for the coming year.

Harvard loves mid-career students because their hands-on experience gives graduate school professors a chance to do research without leaving the classroom. And it does not hurt that mid-career programs bring in bales of money--the top three programs took in over $75 million in tuition last year alone. In some cases, these programs pay for themselves, with funding dollars left over.

Mid-career students and their employers love Harvard simply because it is Harvard: providing a good educational experience and a "Veritas"-stamped certificate that, while academically worthless, is resume gold worldwide.

But there is trouble embedded in this back-to-school trend: growing mid-career programs have to take their faculty, funding and space from somewhere. So far there has been a reduction in master's candidates in one school and a freeze in master's students at another--even while new professors were joining that school's staff.

No one is panicking yet, but as mid-career programs increase, soon graduate schools will soon face a tough choice between tradition and high-paying trend.

"Product" and Payment

HBS Senior Associate Dean for Executive Education W. Earl Sasser refers to the education and skills HBS faculty give their corporate students as "product." That corporate buzzword is typical of a setup that looks more like a cross between a consulting firm and a summer camp than a traditional university.

Executive education courses are intensive--students spend an average of four hours in the classroom and perhaps eight more doing homework and reading every day. Classes are taught by HBS faculty.

Customized classes area also set up for the executives of a particular company--the World Bank and Daimler-Benz are past clients. Tuition runs from $2,750 for one three-day program to $40,500 for the "Advanced Management program," all paid by the student's company. HBS takes in over $50 million in tuition annually.

And HBS executive education students get what they pay for. The new housing center will look more like a hotel on the inside than a dormitory, and many classes spend time in Singapore, Europe or Washington as part of their training.

The KSG runs its own mid-career education programs, focusing heavily on officials from developing countries, in addition to non-profit bureaucrats and American politicians. Its courses cost between $2,750 and $11,100 and have names like "Leadership for the 21st Century" and "Infrastructure in a Market Economy."

The School of Public Health (SPH) offers short seminars for physicians and healthcare executives, and its neighbor the Medical School gives "continuing education" classes updating physicians on new techniques and technologies. The cost of SPH classes hovers around $1,000, and Medical School courses run about $250 on average.