Six months before Harvard Business School officially opened in October 1908, the School had no classrooms, no faculty, and no curriculum. But its proponents had a Big Idea: Create a professional school designed to train managers for a rapidly industrializing economy, require a four-year undergraduate degree for admission, and confer a new degree, the Master in Business Administration, after two years of study.

Obstacles overcome, HBS launched on schedule with 15 faculty, 24 regular students, and 34 “special” students. “No gardener ever tended a fragile plant more carefully than I did, to keep an eye on all the details of our infant School,” wrote Edwin F. Gay, the first dean. The Big Idea took root and, over time, spread far and wide.

One hundred years later, the MBA is the world’s most popular graduate degree, and HBS remains a leader of the increasingly diverse business education pack. Indeed, popularity has led to a disturbing commoditization of the degree.

Just a generation ago, notes Dean Jay Light, there was only a two-year MBA. “Now there are one-year programs, two-year programs, daytime programs, nighttime programs, weekend programs, and executive MBAs. You can even buy an MBA in a box over the Internet for 59 bucks. So the MBA title has come to mean less because the label now covers a rapidly proliferating set of things.”

That’s not the only issue worrying Dean Light and his counterparts at the nation’s top-ranked business schools. Academic critics challenge the degree’s relevance, asserting that programs have drifted too far into theory that has relatively little use in practice. And they fault business schools for turning out graduates fixated on shareholder value at the expense of all else. What’s more, students, alumni, and recruiters — the schools’ customers — all voice concerns about the programs, according to recent research by HBS professors Srikant Datar and David Garvin. They presented their findings to participants in two separate Centennial colloquia on the future of the MBA held last spring on the HBS campus.

Of all the threats to MBA programs I jotted down during the sessions, one put a particularly fine point on doubts about the true value of the degree. Not long ago, companies hired MBAs for their specialized knowledge in disciplines and business functions. Now they can buy computer programs to do the same things.

So if marketing, finance, accounting, and other specialized knowledge can be programmed, packaged, and sold over the counter, where’s the value in the MBA? Such questions keep business school deans awake at night.

Our cover story reviews Datar and Garvin’s findings and takes a look at what the Stanford and Yale business schools already have done to strengthen their MBA programs. The story also describes the key challenges ahead for HBS as a faculty committee explores possible curriculum changes. In Dean Light’s view, that means doing a better job in three broad areas: leadership development, globalization, and experiential learning outside the classroom. Not surprisingly, knowledge in these areas can’t be programmed, packaged, and sold.

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