Had he attended Stanford and joined after graduation, the company would have had 150 employees, he estimated. The changing attitude toward the M.B.A. is particularly striking in Silicon Valley, a new center of American business and yet a place where business school has suddenly become less popular. Applications to Berkeley's program dropped by 11 percent last spring. These days, students worry that their chances of emulating such titans will decrease if they wait two years to start work. With the national unemployment rate at just above 4 percent, many of the start-ups are also making a big push to keep employees who have been at their jobs for two to seven years, traditionally a period of high turnover, Jacques Leger, a human resources consultant with Watson Wyatt in San Francisco, said.
Students notice the difference.
Ms. Proctor herself spent last summer at a small Internet company in San Francisco that asked her to stay when her internship ended. Many school administrators predict that applications will start rising again everywhere as the Internet industry matures. A lot of potential students will make the wrong decision. Everybody thinks they're all going to strike it rich, and it's just not going to happen.