"It also seemed apparent in the so-called new economy, where people are starting businesses in their teenage years, that very talented folks might benefit from an MBA at an earlier stage in their careers," he says. "If one waited, the opportunity cost of stepping out of their ventures might be too high."

Moss says that the shift in recruiting strategy has little to do with the recent declines in application numbers to the top 25 business schools.

Perhaps as a result of the opportunities in the new economy for people without advanced degrees, the number of applicants to the Business Week's top 25 business schools was down seven percent this year, according to this year's Business Week survey of such schools.

Stanford Business School and Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, which are both precipitously close to Silicon Valley, felt the sharpest drops--more than 20 percent since 1998.

In contrast, Moss says Harvard's applicant numbers were down 3.5 percent for this year, which she said HBS did not find troubling. She also cites the general decrease in the number of Americans between 25 and 34, the prime age for business school, as a key factor in the general decline.

HBS has never had a formal policy against accepting undergraduates. About five percent of students who take the GMAT nationally have two years of experience or less, according to Moss, so HBS already has its expected share of that group. She says HBS hopes to increase representation of these students to about seven percent. In a class of 900 MBA candidates, that would be an increase from about 45 students to about 60.

In the two-year MBA program, classes are taught with the highly interactive case method. Instruction is based on student participation, as students discuss their various approaches to a business case.