Some people are just ahead of the pack.

For Oliver Thomas, summers off from Oxford University meant time spent in an office tower, working with CEOs and top executives as an investment banker or accountant. For Lisa B. Schwartz ’03, internships at the U.N. and the Supreme Court of the United States offered a chance to relax from the hectic pace of maintaining her 4.0 GPA.

Thomas, 23, started at Harvard Business School (HBS) this fall after graduating from Oxford University. Along with ten other students in this class, he comes to the prestigious B-School right out of college. For these students, Harvard Business School’s Early Career Initiative—which aims to attract students within three years of graduating college—was just the ticket.

But it remains to be seen whether the initiative, which has been underway for at least three years, is rewriting the rules of HBS admissions, or merely acknowledging those students who are exceptions to them.

“This could be driven by competition over unformed brainiacs with law schools and even Stanford Business School, which has always trended younger,” said Sanford Kreisberg, an independent admissions consultant who runs a much-followed thread on Business Week’s website about elite business school admissions called “ASKANDY.” “Ivy grads with nose-bleed GPAs and unclear career goals used to be hired for two years by investment banks and consulting shops during the boom. Now those kids, by default, go to law school, the haven of the unemployed and undecided. HBS may want some of that DNA.”

But Kreisberg questions the level of follow-through on the initiative.

“They have said this in the past, and results are slim,” he says.

Yet those “nose-bleed GPAs” appear to be alive and well across the river, some the results of the Early Career Initiative.

Both Thomas and Schwartz arrived at HBS this fall, each superstars in their own right. Schwartz, whose 4.0 GPA also earned her a spot Yale law school, will be concurrently pursuing her J.D. and M.B.A., while Thomas hopes to use his HBS experience to help his mother country, England, land the 2012 Olympic Games.

But Thomas says he doesn’t feel that one has to be a ‘super-star’ to come to HBS right out of college.

“I don’t think the word superstars is appropriate at all,” he says, “We are just people who have enjoyed opportunities and are enthusiastic about looking for ways in which to build ourselves and about experiencing different things and different people.”

Thomas says he decided to apply to HBS on a whim—he went to an admissions presentation in London “for future interest,” and when he found out about the early career initiative, he applied. In matriculating, he ditched his offers from an investment bank and Proctor and Gamble in favor of crossing the pond for B-School.

“I always thought that you had to be 25+ for the premier business schools,” says Thomas, “but I gathered from this presentation that that is not the case, and that a lot of people wait too long.”

With summer jobs at investment bank Goldman Sachs and the now-defunct accounting firm Arthur Anderson under his belt, Thomas applied—but, he says, “to be honest, I thought it was a massive outside shot that I would win myself a place.”

Thomas sees his summer experiences as having been key to his gaining admission.

“I was really lucky that I had really high-quality experiences over the summer with those firms,” Thomas adds. “I never just had ‘shadowing’ jobs, but was actually given real responsibility, so for someone my age, I managed to accumulate a significant amount of experience just in my summers.”

A Shifting Focus

Efforts to gain a larger early-career student population at HBS come as a result of a variety of interests—from the pedantic to the practical.

“We had created a self-fulfilling prophecy, where because we emphasized getting work experience, people started...getting a little more experience, and we started admitting more experienced students.” HBS Dean Kim Clark told Bizforward magazine in September 2001.

Currently, the average work experience of HBS students is 4 years.

“We started hearing things, where a lot of companies have decided that they are going to try and keep their very best people from going to business school,” he said. “We were worried that we were going to start losing the very best people who would not ever go to business school.”

In the mid-90s, HBS had about one to two students per class who came right from college, according to HBS Managing Director of Admissions and Financial Aid Brit K. Dewey.

“A couple of years ago, the school started noticing some things about our admission candidates,” says Shad Professor of Business Ethics Joseph L. Badaracco. “One, we got very, very long resumes—word had gotten around that it was to have two—even three—entry-level jobs before applying. There was an ‘experience’ creep—and we ended up with students who had far too much experience, students who could apply for entry-level executive programs.”

“We were worried,” Badaracco adds. “We didn’t want people to think that they had to work for McKinsey, then Goldman Sachs, and then apply to HBS after all that.”

But Badaracco says that the initiative does not mandate an about-face in HBS admissions procedures.

“My hunch is that we will go more slowly, and try to get a sense of what the true experience has been for students right out of college, let a couple of years pass,” he says.

“There had been a very strong tradition of having people come to HBS right out of college, but then, the word was out on the street that you had to wait to go to B-school,” Dewey says, noting that eBay CEO Meg Whitman came to HBS directly from Princeton University. “Conventional Wisdom kept reinventing itself. So we looked at our applicant pool and said where are the amazing folks who want to come out of college?”

Furthermore, faculty felt that HBS’ signature case study teaching method was enhanced by a diverse age-range in the classroom, according to a Harvard Magazine article by Cizik Professor of Business Administration David A. Garvin. The method, which uses real-life business examples to spark discussions on organizational problem-solving, relies on students with different experiences and points of view chiming in, Garvin wrote.

The Early Career Initiative was born out of this reaction—and with brochures and postcards printed, HBS admissions offers are doing more than ever to help spread the word that there is “no right time to apply to business school.”

“Everyone seems to think that having one—or even two—jobs after college will make you a more competitive candidate at this place,” Dewey says. “Very few people apply right out of college. But we don’t feel that there really is a right time to apply, and it’s up to each individual to take stock in where they are now. We want people to think about HBS as an option right out of college.”

But some say they are concerned about the larger implications of the change in student demographics.

Kreisberg says that the change in targeted applicants comes at a time when HBS is undergoing what some call an “academization”—turning away from a management school into a technical school.

He says that having more students come directly from college might hurt HBS in the long-run, as it pushes the academization process further.

“If 20-30 percent of the class were new grads, it would be a sad trend towards more unreality over there,” Kreisberg says. “Their vaunted case method is devolving away from a Socratic dialog among experienced young adults towards problem sets for whiz kids.”

Indeed, some at HBS concur with Kreisberg regarding the dangers of academization.

“Too many of our cases are turning into glorified problem sets,” says Chair of the MBA Program W. Carl Kester in Galvin’s Harvard Magazine article. “They have a methodological line of attack and a single, preferred, right answer. They are exercises in applied analysis.”

He points out that “action-skills” of diagnosis, decision-making and implementation, now all receive less attention in the school’s MBA curriculum.

Regardless, HBS marches on with the initiative.

As part of this plan, the HBS Admissions group visited over 30 college campuses this fall to help undo the misconception that business school is not an option for recent graduates.

HBS receives “just under 10,000” applications a year and takes roughly 1 out of 10 students, according to Dewey. While only 100-200 of those applications are submitted by students on the cusp of graduating from college, the one-tenth acceptance rate applies equally well to that group, Dewey adds.

Admitted, But Accepted?

Although changing admissions policies and procedures is one hallmark of the early career initiative, the integration of early-career students into the HBS community is also part of the equation.

Badaracco says that teaching HBS classes to a mixed audience—with students right out college and students with heavy job experience—is “harder in one way, and easier in another.”

“It makes it harder because we rely heavily on students’ discussions and insights,” he says. “We want students to have some real-world experience—and it’s just not an even playing field.”

Despite Badaracco’s reservations, however, students who have matriculated at HBS straight out of college seem to be content with their choice.

“None of us have a problem with the classes and with having less experience in the job world than some of our classmates,” Thomas says, referring to his early-career peers. “We were all obviously a little apprehensive at first, but the school really made an effort to make us feel so welcome, so I’m just happy the way it’s been so far. I am definitely treated as an equal.”

Thomas adds that there is no sense of inferiority, either in the classroom or outside of it.

“We are in a position to contribute just as much as the rest of the class,” he says. “Everyone, no matter their background or working-world experiences, seems to universally have a wealth of leadership and life experiences. My classmates—some of whom are just arriving on campus from Iraq, some from McKinsey—are a truly fascinating group of people.”

Thomas says he hopes to go into consulting and plans to work for the London bid for the 2012 Olympic Games this summer.

Schwartz, who plans to go into government in the future, adds that she enjoys the challenge of HBS classes. “I love the style of learning at HBS. The case method combines an academic and practical focus that I find so engaging across all my classes,” she says, remarking on the collaborative nature of HBS classes. “Everyone wants to help each other as much as possible—we just went through our first round of midterms, and there was definitely a mind-set that everyone is in this together.”

Schwartz says the social life was also an easy transition—even for the younger crowd.

“Everyone at HBS has such different experiences that my coming straight from college is another unique background,” she says. “Of course, I stand out because I am younger—I have a lot of friends here who are 30, for example, so I went to my first 30th birthday party last week.”

—Staff Writer Lauren A. E. Schuker can be reached at schuker@fas.harvard.edu.