Unfinished Business: Is the Degree Key?

William Fulbright Foote says he had an existential crisis even before his Harvard Business School orientation ended in 1998. He had worked in investment banking covering emerging markets for Lehman Brothers (LEH ) and then spent two years writing about the Mexican peso crisis as a journalism fellow.

Foote says he knew he wanted to use his financial knowhow to help the people he was writing about take control of their destiny. At first, he thought HBS was the right path. But when angel investors came knocking on his door two months into the MBA program, he decided he didn't want to wait to achieve his goal. He left B-school -- and never looked back.

Although leaving graduate school is much rarer than dropping out of high school or even college, it still happens occasionally, say admissions staff at the country's best B-schools. Every year, a handful of people leave top MBA programs before graduation for a variety of reasons -- from failing out to an illness in the family. An even smaller group drop out in pursuit of a career opportunity -- and some of them find more success than if they had earned the MBA.

SECOND THOUGHTS?  You've probably heard stories of people who had to decide between applying to B-school and accepting a unique job offer. But a select group of students will discover the chance of a lifetime while already enrolled in a top program. Many MBA dropouts leave school for the same reason they applied: They want to shake things up and reach career nirvana as quickly as possible. When you talk to those few who left before graduation, you find that the degree isn't necessarily a golden ticket, and that some people will accomplish great things even without the MBA.

Today, Foote is the president and founder of EcoLogic Finance, the nonprofit he started when he quit B-school. The nearly seven-year-old company offers affordable financial services to community-based businesses in Latin America and select countries in Africa and Asia. While Foote envies the network that his wife developed by completing the Harvard MBA, he says leaving B-school was the best decision for him because he's doing exactly what he always wanted to do.

Does everyone who leaves business school do so without regret? Well, it's hard to believe that MBA dropouts like Microsoft (MSFT ) CEO Steve Ballmer, who left Stanford Graduate School of Business to work with his college buddy Bill Gates, and filmmaker Georgia Lee, who left HBS and was discovered by Martin Scorsese, have second thoughts about their decisions.

BACK TO SCHOOL.  Not everyone is as lucky as Ballmer and Lee, but most dropouts say leaving school is its own lesson. The road to success was rockier for some, especially those who left B-school during the heady days of the Internet boom. In the late 1990s, it was in vogue to drop out and launch a startup, says Graham Richmond, co-founder of admissions-consulting firm Clear Admit in Philadelphia. "There was a culture of leaving," he says. "Ten to 15 people would leave every year, and not all of them came back."

Many of those who sought millions failed to find them, and some of them eventually returned to the classroom. Take Daniel Blatt, who lives in Paris and is vice-president of the private equity firm Capital Guidance. At the end of his first year at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, Blatt and a group of his classmates hatched an idea for a biotechnology and intellectual-property business that won Wharton's business-plan competition.

That's when the idea to quit school came into focus. Blatt wrote to academic services asking for an indefinite leave of absence, and the school quickly gave him its blessing. In fact, he had up to five years to return to the MBA program without having to reapply, and with no questions asked.

After a year, the startup started having problems, and the group couldn't raise the $8 million it needed to stay in business. Blatt returned to Wharton and graduated in 2002. He says he has zero regrets because he learned from the experience, even if it had a negative outcome. "We had the good fortune to live a little bit of the startup dot-com craze," he adds.

DEGREE POWER.  For some, the degree turns out to be a useful tool for climbing the corporate ladder. The MBA, Blatt says, broadened his skill set and helped him return to Europe, where most of his family live. There's also always the question of money. With tuition often costing upwards of $80,000, many students who are already enrolled in top MBA programs have made a hefty financial commitment that includes student loans and tuition payments. Richmond says his clients would probably require a really special reason for thinking about quitting once enrolled.

Admissions consultants advise potential and current students about applying to or leaving B-school on a case-by-case basis. But most of them say they believe in the power of the degree. "You might get the job offer without an MBA, but how will you perform without it?" asks Richmond. On the other hand, some of those who left business school say they had already gotten all they needed from the program.

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