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Deciding whether to pursue an advanced degree is a question many if not most undergraduates now ponder as they reach the end of their college careers. For members of this year’s graduating class in search of the best way to secure a bright financial future, the answer could now be a graduate program with a more creative emphasis than conventional wisdom has normally dictated.

Five years ago, anyone graduating with a master of business administration degree had good reason to be outlandishly optimistic. At the height of the dot-com boom it would not have been a very rare or even unrealistic assumption for M.B.A. graduates to believe they could in all likelihood be millionaires by age 30. That was just how fast the money seemed to be rolling in for the many Internet start-ups that were busy gobbling up nearly every M.B.A. in sight.

As everyone by now knows, the bubble would soon burst. And by all accounts, many new M.B.A.s have since experienced a rather rude awakening.

According to a poll conducted every three years by Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, only 60 percent of business school graduates reported having secured full-time jobs as of mid-March 2003 versus 84 percent at the same time in 2000. And though recent reports indicate new M.B.A. hiring is up slightly for 2004, it is still nowhere near 1999 or 2000 levels.

Instead of continuing to put all its eggs in one basket, corporate America seems to have learned its lesson from the dot-com bust.

“What I have heard from a lot of employers is that they’re (now) recruiting people with a wide variety of backgrounds,” said Steven Rothberg, president of CollegeRecruiter.com, a job listing Web site geared toward students and recent graduates. “There’s a tendency for M.B.A.s being analytical and numbers-driven, and those are wonderful strengths to have. But a lot of times those people are not the creative thinkers, the loose cannons that every organization needs. So a good mixture of the two is very healthy.”

In their search for those creative thinkers, some companies appear to be widening their field of vision to include degree holders they might never have considered before: art students. A February article in the Harvard Business Review even went so far as to call the the master of fine arts degree the new M.B.A.

Beth Doling, marketing coordinator for The Lucas Group – an Atlanta-based recruiting and executive search firm with offices in Los Angeles – explains the logic behind this change as an effect of the recent economic decline.

“Let’s say that a company had been working with an agency (to meet its creative needs). With the economic downturn, (it has) ended up needing someone who’s more versatile, who can handle that type of work in-house,” Doling said.

Part of this story could also be explained by just how selective art schools now are in comparison with business schools. At UCLA, graduate admissions rates for the art department was 3 percent of all applicants for the last academic term, and

Design | Media Arts was around 8 percent. The Anderson School of Business, on the other hand, admitted closer to 11 percent of all applicants.

But even if M.F.A.s are graduating from a more competitive pool of talent, what exactly could art students bring to the business world? Rothberg points out that many of the hot products on the market today that have the largest profit margins, such as Apple’s iPod, have an element of art to them.

“If all (companies) are looking to do is to sell a commodity, then you really don’t need people with great artistic ability. But the products that command the greatest premium in price tend to be those that are the most unusual, that have the greatest design,” Rothberg said.

Of course, all this doesn’t necessarily mean that M.F.A. students will soon be running at the chance to sign up with a major corporation. Many art students are drawn to their field because they feel rather strongly that they don’t belong in the business world.

Osman Khan, who is graduating from UCLA this term with an M.F.A. in Design | Media Arts, sees himself more as a social critic and an artist than as someone heading out into the world looking to land a steady job. His M.F.A. thesis project, currently on display in Kinross Building South’s New Wight Gallery, includes several displays that ask visitors to use their credit cards in order to interact with the art. But the economic realities of trying to live the life of an artist have also made Khan somewhat more circumspect about his future.

“I’m not against it,” Khan explained of his feelings about working in the business world. “If the offer was right and it was interesting, I would consider it.”