The Times reports that more and more college grads are skipping business school altogether and instead going straight into working at a hedge fund.

(Is this one reason why so few of today’s college students care about the war? Because they’ve been paid off?)

As more Americans have become abundantly wealthy, young people are recalculating old assumptions about success. The flood of money into private equity and hedge funds over the last decade has made billionaires out of people like Kenneth Griffin, 38, chief executive of the Citadel Investment Group [blogger: Also, #25 on the 02138 Harvard 100], and Eddie Lampert, 45, the hedge fund king who bought Sears and Kmart. These men are icons for the fast buck set — particularly the mathematically gifted cohort of rising stars known as “quants.” Many college graduates who are bright enough to be top computer scientists or medical researchers are becoming traders instead, and they measure their status in dollars instead of titles.

…And top performers at the banks make so much money today that they don’t want to take two years off for business school, even if it’s a prestigious institution like the Wharton School or Harvard.

All of which puts HBS’s new 2+2 program into a new light—instead of it being a good deal for undergrads, maybe it’s actually an attempt to lock them in before they realize they can make much more money without going to business school…..