First of two parts

After graduating from Stanford University, Tim Jones didn’t want to waste three or four years “doing grunt work and trying to prove myself.” He felt that he had spent enough time preparing reports and PowerPoint slides during summer internships without ever getting the chance to sit in on the presentations to senior management. So last year, he jumped right from Stanford into the MBA program at Washington University in St. Louis. “The MBA will give me a competitive advantage over people of similar age,” says Jones, who is concentrating on finance and accounting. “I will be ready to make important decisions and advance faster; my employer will trust me more with an MBA.”

MBA programs that admit recent college graduates seem tailor made for the impatient, highly confident members of the millennial generation who hope to bypass routine entry-level jobs and start higher up in the ranks. “My friends and I want to have impact and do meaningful work as soon as we land at a company,” explains Anton Doss, who headed straight from Hampton University to Carnegie Mellon University’s MBA program. After graduation, he expects to join Bank of America’s leadership development program.

Business schools started relaxing their work experience requirements a few years ago to lure the best and brightest right out of college before they detoured into law, medicine or other fields, and to diversify their classrooms with more women, minorities, and science and liberal arts majors. In fact, the fastest growing age group taking the Graduate Management Admission Test is younger than 24, with an average annual growth rate of 23.6 percent between testing years 2004-2005 and 2008-2009. Millennials who are just 20 and 21 years old represent 10.3 percent of all test takers, up from 1.6 percent five years ago.

Some schools recognized that undergraduates with academic prowess, strategic thinking skills, and clear career goals might be ready for an MBA without the usual three or four years of full-time work experience on their resumes. But what some deans didn’t realize was how popular these early career MBA programs would be with the ambitious millennials—born in the 1980s and 1990s. “Why not reach for the stars if you already know what you want to pursue and believe you have what it takes to be on the fast track?” says Mena Cammett. After her senior year at Yale University, she advanced directly into its MBA program as a Silver Scholar, who will do a one-year internship between her first and second year of coursework. Eventually, she aims to help spur business and economic development in the Middle East.

Precocious millennials definitely make career plans much earlier than previous generations. Indeed, Deloitte & Touche’s research found that nearly half of 12-to-14-year-old millennials had started thinking seriously about future occupations. By the time they had turned 17 or 18, many were already locked into a career path. In response to that surprising finding, Deloitte began offering career guidebooks to young teens, including a plug for the auditing profession.