"It's pretty much the first thing you need to focus on," he says.

With students ever more obsessed over their futures in a rapidly changing economy, the job hunt has become the top course on campus. And frequently the first course: While a decade ago on-campus recruiting typically began just months before graduation, it now sometimes starts during first-year orientation week.

Although the task of landing choice jobs has always helped define an M.B.A. program's success, its importance has grown as tuition has increased and as the average student has become older and more mature. And it has further gained priority since major magazines, starting with a 1988 Business Week survey, began rating business schools. Business Week tallies letter grades that M.B.A. graduates and corporate recruiters give the schools and lists new grads' average starting pay, the average number of job offers and the percentage of grads without offers.

These ratings have become the Consumer Reports of business education. Because the ratings are so crucial to attracting top students, deans are under growing pressure to elevate, or at least maintain, their schools' rankings. So they push their staffs to view students and recruiters alike as "customers" who must be served.

"Business schools have become much more customer-focused," says John Rau, dean of Indiana University's business school. "We practice what we teach." This fall, the school even began tying teachers' salary raises, in part, to how well they help students land jobs.

"We're not exactly an employment agency, but it comes pretty close," says Randolph Westerfield, dean of the University of Southern California's business school.

To some observers, the schools are ceding too much academic ground to recruiters and students. And some educators themselves worry that they are striving too hard to boost school ratings. "The rankings have forced us to graduate everyone, which can be a serious problem over the long run," says William Pierskalla, dean of the graduate business school at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Many faculty members resent the change, "but there's not much we can do about it anymore," says Prof. Leonard Greenhalgh at Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business. For the first time in its history, Tuck allowed recruiters on campus during the fall semester this year. "Almost every other leading school has expanded recruiting into the fall," Prof. Greenhalgh says. "We were at a competitive disadvantage."

And because students formally evaluate their professors as often as twice a semester, professors feel pressed to play down theory in favor of more "real world" context. They worry as formerly optional career classes become integral to M.B.A. curriculums. For instance, Duke University's required "Individual Effectiveness" course is partly devoted to interviewing skills, job-offer negotiation, telephone etiquette and other preparations for the job hunt. A required "Career Management" seminar series at New York University's graduate business school includes one called "How to Work a Room."

And some administrators have felt the impact. At 17 of 20 leading schools, placement directors have either resigned or been dismissed since 1990 -- sometimes at the urging of dissatisfied students.

Meanwhile, students have become "like kids cut loose in a candy store," says Roger Muller, former placement director at Northwestern University's Kellogg graduate business school. Students now can spend up to 20 hours a week searching for the sweetest job offer at an endless round of corporate presentations, wine-bar receptions and fly-in/fly-out interviews.

"The temptation to get swept up in the job-hunting frenzy is enormous," says Philip Anderson, a Tuck School professor.

He partly blames recruiters, whose autumn presentations and lavish dinners encourage first-year students to apply for summer internships. Once mainly a source of cheap labor for employers and a resume builder for students, internships now are so important in the recruiting process that students have "this wacky notion that the summer job is the magic bullet," Mr. Anderson says. "If you don't show up and nibble canapes and drink white wine, you're out of the horse race."

But students can start the race without even leaving their rooms; many have an electronic-mail address. "Recruiting and job hunting has become part of daily life because the career hunt is now piped right into their rooms," says Maury Hanigan of Hanigan Consulting Group, which helps companies recruit M.B.A. graduates.

Students agree that the process may be undermining education. During her first weeks at the UCLA graduate business school, Lisa Nibauer tried to concentrate on schoolwork. But with classmates stampeding to dozens of corporate presentations, career-club meetings, resume-writing seminars and recruiter-sponsored parties, she felt she had to go along.

"I thought I'd have this breather period where I'd be doing class work," Ms. Nibauer says. "But everyone's walking around in interview suits."

On-campus interviewing has doubled at UCLA. Last year, about 6,000 individual interviews were conducted on campus -- about 20 per student. And at Indiana University, Placement Director Randy Powell says the average M.B.A. now interviews with about 30 companies, far more than in the past. "It's become excessive," he says. "Never again in their life will they interview with that many companies."

Once internships are behind them, many students spend much of their final year crisscrossing the country for interviews. "It was nonstop flying," says Al Petrone, a 1995 Duke M.B.A. who made about 20 company visits before ending up at ITT Sheraton Corp.

Final-year students are sometimes pressured to accept "exploding" offers, which are rescinded after a limited time. Some schools discourage such offers, but recruiters argue they merely reflect free-market principles.

"There's tremendous competition for the best students right now, and we're doing our best to make sure they come to work for us," says David Reed, recruiting director of Andersen Consulting, which plans to hire 600 M.B.A.s this season.

That competition to hire M.B.A.s may seem odd while many big companies are laying off employees by the thousands. But the companies say they aren't replacing older employees on a one-for-one basis but rather are hunting for new kinds of talent, frequently an ability to handle a computerized environment. And recruiters say business schools sift through potential recruits more efficiently than they can.

"Merck & Co. gets more than 250,000 resumes a year," says Ms. Hanigan, who advises the company. Between applicants eager to pursue an M.B.A. and top schools' high admission standards, she says, "all you have left is the cream of the crop."

Moreover, school admissions directors have heeded recruiters' pleas for more-experienced applicants. Incoming students at top schools now average about 3 1/2 years of job experience, twice as much as a decade ago. "We used to take in a lot more people right out of college," says Meyer Feldberg, dean of the Columbia Business School. "Now, it's only a handful." The result, adds Hoyle Jones, Citibank's director of university recruiting, is "a much more mature, experienced product."

Others doubt that course content makes much difference. "We don't develop people by sending them off for an M.B.A.," says D. Douglas McKenna, general manager of executive development at Microsoft Corp., which nonetheless plans to hire M.B.A.s this year. "In fact, we usually have to unlearn them of some of the things they pick up in those programs." But some recruiters believe that that is still better than trying to retrain middle-aged managers.

Some students' course work suffers from the recruiting distractions -- Christian Armbruester was so consumed with presentations at Columbia Business School this fall that he missed two classes entirely -- but they wouldn't have it any other way. Their single-mindedness partly reflects economic pressure. At 20 leading business schools, annual tuition has soared to an average of $18,000, up 56% since 1990 -- and saddles new graduates with a lot of debt. "We're making a huge investment here," Mr. Armbruester says. "And the payoff is a job."

Aware of this pressure, schools strive to facilitate job-hunting. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology and UCLA have added posh wings stuffed with interview rooms and high-tech career centers. Last year, Duke's center installed a video-conferencing system so students could conduct international interviews. Since 1990, Duke, through its own strenuous recruiting of employers, has doubled the number of companies annually coming to its campus to 303. In the past two years, UCLA has tripled its placement staffers to 14.

But administrators say students still crave more. Clutching a magazine article about Harvard M.B.A.s earning $100,000 right out of school, an M.B.A. student at Indiana University confronted Mr. Powell and asked, "Why aren't I getting that?"

"Some have very unrealistic expectations," the placement director says.

Partly because of low student ratings of its placement services, Cornell University's Johnson school slipped in the Business Week rankings to 16th in 1990 from fifth the previous year. That comedown spurred even more student complaints, and Cornell urged the career-services director to resign. She did. Then, the school tripled its career-services budget.

Schools are also retooling their basic educational programs to address student concerns about spending two years without income. Many now offer compressed 18-month schedules, and a few have one-year M.B.A. programs -- which some observers disparage. "There's no way you can get as much learning done in a year," says Roslyn Dickerson, vice president of corporate recruiting at Merrill Lynch & Co., which limits recruiting in the U.S. to two-year programs.

Other schools, including Duke and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, offer additional midterm breaks for job hunting.

"We've redesigned the curriculum and calendar to recognize that recruiting is an important part of the development process," says Prof. Leonard Schlesinger of Harvard Business School, which lopped off a month from its academic term this year. Though it continues to ban on-campus recruiting in the autumn, students and recruiters meet clandestinely at nearby hotels.

Potential employers are influencing course content. Companies have lobbied for courses that teach the "team" management techniques that have swept Corporate America, and now many schools embrace the team concept in nearly every discipline. Even in finance, USC Dean Westerfield says, "We now recognize that to be a leader, it takes a whole new set of communications skills in addition to the analytical skills. And those can only be taught in a team environment."

Whether this trend is desirable is debatable. Team projects nearly always take longer than those done individually because students' skills vary so widely. And teams can undermine learning by allowing some students to lean on others. Taking one team-oriented course last year, MIT student Matthew Bruck says, "I was an English major, so I did a lot of writing, and a guy who was a statistics major did all the number crunching."

Others say students often get teams to cover for them. When USC business student Ken Perlman had four job interviews in one week, he spent his time preparing, and, he says, "My teammates took notes for me, so I didn't have to go to class." Such tactics dismay most professors, but, surprisingly, some recruiters applaud them. "That's how the real world works," says Mr. Reed of Andersen Consulting. In addition, some Columbia professors, catering to students away at job interviews, videotape their lectures for later viewing.

Some professors worry about academic standards as schools placate students. "You don't fail your customer," says Bruce Kogut, a professor at Wharton, where a pass/fail system lets failing students repeat classes. Many schools have dropped grading curves, adopted pass/fail and urge students not to tell recruiters their grades until they graduate.

Graduation rates have always been high for M.B.A. programs, but over the past decade they have edged toward 99% at many leading schools. "When I started my M.B.A. at Harvard, they said, `Look around, because 10% of you won't make it to graduation.' That just doesn't happen anymore," UCLA's Mr. Pierskalla says.

A. Scott Armstrong, a professor at Wharton, estimates that fewer than 1% of its students now fail the average Wharton course. "Business schools have developed elaborate and expensive grading systems to ensure that even the least competent and least interested get credit," he adds. Wharton officials say this is because admissions standards have risen.

The lack of complete information doesn't worry many recruiters. "We have to make some educated guesses about students," Andersen's Mr. Reed says. Indeed, few recruiters say the M.B.A. education itself is the primary reason for hiring M.B.A.s. "We're buying more of what they already have than what they learned at M.B.A. school," Mr. Reed says.

CX Corrections & Amplifications ROGER MULLER, former placement director of Northwestern University's Kellogg graduate business school, who was quoted in a page-one article on business schools yesterday, left of his own accord to take another job. The placement of his quote might have implied incorrectly that he left under pressure. (WSJ Dec. 6, 1995)

"I guess they really wanted me," says 27-year-old Mr. Baum, who just graduated from Carnegie Mellon University’s business school and will soon start at Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc. Salaries for Booz Allen’s 1995 M.B.A. recruits start at around $80,000, plus a $20,000 signing bonus and a generous relocation package.

This year’s business-school graduates are enjoying hot demand, thanks to economic recovery and a booming management-consulting industry now feeding corporate America’s "reengineering" frenzy. Placement directors at 20 leading graduate business schools across the country report strong increases in corporate recruiting, placements and average salaries -- especially for those joining management-consulting firms.

"It’s the year of the consultant," says Stephen Johansson, director of career services at Cornell University’s school of management. He and other placement directors say the consulting firms’ aggressive hiring practices have bid up starting M.B.A. pay by 5% to 10% since last year.

"Consulting did for M.B.A. hires what investment banks did back in the 1980s," adds Cindy McNeese, another Booz Allen recruit who graduated from Vanderbilt University’s business school earlier this month.

Average starting salaries for new M.B.A.s, which vary greatly by institution and region, now range from roughly $40,000 to $70,000. While few employers other than management consultants and investment banks gave new grads signing bonuses a few years ago, many manufacturers offer them now.

Management-consulting firms have largely focused their recruiting efforts on 20 leading business schools. Nearly 35% of this year’s graduates at top business schools have joined consultants, placement directors say. With the help of generous signing bonuses, pay for first-year management consultants from leading schools can top $100,000.

"That certainly helps when you’re coming out of school with lots of student loans," says Melissa Javer, who got her M.B.A. from Columbia Business School last week and is headed to Booz Allen.

But she says the money is only part of management consulting’s allure for students. Having left a hierarchical financial-services firm, she says she wants "to help companies move away from all that."

Fresh from courses in change management and re-engineering, Ms. Javer and other 1995 graduates are eager to put into practice the latest team-based management concepts. And even outside of management consulting, corporate recruiters are seeking employees who are ready for change.

"We’ve hired more M.B.A.s than we ever have in the past," says John Flato, corporate director of university relations for AlliedSignal Inc. "We’ve taken out layers of management . . . and we hope that these M.B.A.s will be more self-directed" than the old-style employees, he adds.

Even companies fresh from cutbacks have increased their M.B.A. recruiting. Take P&G, which eliminated 13,000 jobs two years ago. Even after proclaiming, "We must slim down to stay competitive," the company’s chairman approved the hiring of about 650 graduates for entry-level management positions this year. That’s a 33% increase from 1994 (though fewer than the 1,000 recruited in 1990), P&G adds.

Of course, some employers that have had widespread layoffs fear that remaining employees will be angered or worried by the increased M.B.A. hiring. However, newly minted M.B.A.s don’t usually replace long-serving employees on a one-to-one basis. "It’s not like we’re laying off people and replacing them with new hires," says Gregory Baker, a campus recruiting manager for AlliedSignal. "It’s a different talent pool."

And whether recruiting is resented or not, companies feel they need to do it. "There is this mentality that despite what’s going on with layoffs, you’ve got to bring in new blood," says Roger Muller, a former placement director at Northwestern University’s Kellogg business school. The biggest reason companies pursue freshly minted M.B.A.s is simple. "They’re cheaper," says one campus recruiter for an East Coast electronics manufacturer. "You don’t have to hire a headhunter. You don’t have to relocate them. They bring in fresh ideas, and you don’t have to break them of an old corporate culture."

As the consulting business grows, so does demand for consulting firms to implement their suggested strategies—work that once fell to inside middle managers. That appeals to new graduates like William Crawford, who is eager to see the fruits of his labors. "I’m pretty pleased to go in and actually implement the solutions," says Mr. Crawford, a new Columbia M.B.A. who will join a management-consulting firm. "To simply do an analysis, drop a report on the CEO’s desk and leave would be unfulfilling."

Many young consultants may not see the long-term results of their ideas, though. "Turnover in consulting firms is very high," Mr. Muller says, adding that people usually leave within three years. He and others say that many people who go into consulting see the job as a chance to make contacts and gain exposure to a variety of industries.

To aid graduates who may be too zealous about pushing change, many business schools now include courses to help M.B.A.s deflect the resentment they may cause. "What I tell students is to think of themselves as guilty until proven innocent," says Joel Brockner, who teaches change management at Columbia’s business school. "There’s always been resistance to change, but with M.B.A. recruits coming in at the same time there’s layoffs happening, their presence alone could fan the flames. What’s needed is a little humility."