For years, Henry Riggs contemplated a radical idea: Why not build a master's degree program in applied life sciences to prepare students for jobs in some of the fastest-growing industries in the world?

At first blush, this hardly seems revolutionary. But think about the low status of the traditional master of science diploma. Think about academic purity, the cherished belief that a campus lab should operate free of commercial considerations. Think about other ivory-tower orthodoxies that had no place in Riggs's scheme - tenure, for instance. Only then will it become clear just how bold was the notion of creating a respected, business-oriented master's in bioscience.

Riggs's brainchild, the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences (KGI) in Claremont, California, admitted its first 28 students in fall 2000. It joined a small but rapidly growing number of two-year, professional master's degree programs not only in bioscience but also in physical science and mathematics. Although KGI stands apart in some ways - it has far more money, for starters - all the programs represent a major departure in graduate science education.

The programs are built on twin assumptions: Science majors should be able to capitalize on their background even if they don't want to spend their lives doing basic research. And Ph.D. training often does not provide the right preparation for an industry career. The new professional master's programs, also known as terminal master's, teach a mix of high-level science, business fundamentals, and the skills needed to work across disciplines, in competitive, constantly changing fields.

"Industry groups keep saying, We need students who can communicate. We need students who can work on teams. We need students who can work on messy problems," says Riggs, an engineer by training who formerly served as president of Harvey Mudd College and is now president of KGI. "That kind of advice has been really helpful in focusing not only what we teach but the way we teach it."

The master's programs also share a considerable challenge: selling prospective students and industry recruiters on the value of a new degree.

Out of the Wasteland

Versions of today's professional master's programs have been around for at least 10 years, but the push to revamp graduate education in science began in earnest in the mid-1990s. The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) published a report urging academia to reform Ph.D. programs to make them relevant to burgeoning fields like biotech and computer science. Although the NAS did not recommend the new master's, the report underscored the fact that the job market for scientists was shrinking in academia but expanding in industry.

In 1995, a slim book titled Rethinking Science as a Career (available from the Research Corporation) proposed a reinvention of the science master's. "I saw the degree as a wasteland," says Sheila Tobias, who wrote the book with Daryl E. Chubin and Kevin Aylesworth. The traditional degree was little more than a stepping-stone to a Ph.D. - or a booby prize for grad students who failed to earn a doctorate.

This made no sense. While nobody disputed the need for Ph.D.s, people like Tobias and Riggs argued that doctoral training often is too specialized for many jobs in corporate labs or executive suites. On the flip side, biotech and pharmaceutical firms would do well to hire managers and marketers coming from strong science programs, instead of the classic M.B.A.

The professional master's movement got its biggest boost in 1997 when the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation in New York gave seed money to five universities to launch these degrees. Each school received about $400,000 to develop programs in three tracks - physical science, applied bioscience, and mathematics.

The Sloan effort soon expanded, in hopes of sparking a national initiative. The foundation has helped launch programs at 17 universities, including the University of Arizona, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Michigan State. Some of these are "multi-track" programs in a variety of disciplines, including computational chemistry, human-computer interaction, industrial microbiology, and applied physics. Other programs are "single track," centering on bioinformatics. Sloan continues to seed the field, moving beyond research universities to support programs at master's level campuses.

Sloan-funded or not, professional master's programs find their inspiration in engineering schools and the M.B.A. Like engineering schools, the new programs aim to provide heavy-duty technical training. "This is not a watered-down master's at all," says Alaina Levine, director of special projects at the University of Arizona College of Science. "It's a rigorous science master's degree. Sixty to seventy percent of the curriculum is science."

The rest is business. Course work covers fundamentals - finance, marketing, accounting, intellectual property. Internships are a hallmark. So are seminars with corporate executives. "Students need to be constantly in touch with industry," Levine says.

The links between businesses and the new master's programs run deep. Advisory boards with industry representatives weigh in on curriculum and other academic matters. Besides its board, KGI receives counsel from a "corporate roundtable," a group of top company executives. The strong corporate connection raises the hackles of faculty traditionalists on many campuses, including KGI's home, the Claremont University Consortium of the Claremont Colleges. "There were some people who raised hell," Riggs says.

The new programs try to style themselves in the modern corporate mode. Gone is the academic icon of scientist as loner, laboring solo (or with grad student disciples) in the lab. "Teamwork" is the buzzword. Cross-disciplinary projects are emphasized, to push students to consider science, ethics, financing, and marketing as apects of any problem, not independent spheres. Instead of presenting a master's thesis, KGI students complete team master's projects. The hope is that companies will submit problems for students to work on - as well as money to help them pull it off. The first class of students, now returning from internships for their final academic year, will test the approach.

Built from Scratch

Born with a $50 million endowment from the W.M. Keck Foundation, KGI may be the best laboratory for testing the idea of the new science master's. The school is new, and is not bound by rules, habits, and relationships cemented over the years. "We built everything from scratch," says David Galas, chief academic officer. "We tried to do everything we could to break down several kinds of barriers." These included walls between science and technical disciplines, and between the technical and managerial sides.

KGI is the first graduate school in the U.S. dedicated solely to the marriage of the life sciences and engineering subdisciplines. There is no faculty tenure, another "threatening" departure from academic tradition, Riggs says. "We're not on a crusade about tenure. We just don't think it suits us." He expects "a flow" of faculty - teachers leaving for commercial ventures, and possibly returning someday. There's also a harsher reality: Today's faculty experts may not have the edge to teach tomorrow's technical disciplines.

For students, an obvious appeal of the professional master's is the time frame. "I liked the idea of going to school for two years, rather than five or six for a Ph.D.," says Jeffrey Graybill, a second-year student at KGI. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to recruit students to a new program offering a degree whose value is untested.

Keck has a distinct advantage over competitors, however. The school gave the first class a free ride: full tuition ($28,800 this year) plus living expenses. This fall's entering class will receive grants ranging from half to full tuition, plus stipends of $4,000 to $14,000.

"They wanted quality, and they weren't going to sit around waiting for this degree to become appreciated," Tobias observes.

KGI officials say they learned a lot the first year. Students come from such varied science and technical backgrounds that teachers realized they had to be more aggressive about "background filling." In addition, so much work was done in teams that professors sometimes found it difficult to evaluate individual students' performances. And in the excitement of building a new school, teachers piled on the work, especially the first semester.

"Students were here from nine o'clock in the morning into late evening," Galas says. "I think they were starting to burn out. So we've backed up a little in the intensity."

Probably the biggest success so far has been the summer internship. All students had placements, and reports were enthusiastic. "A great experience," says Graybill, who worked at a startup launched by one of his professors. "One week [I'd be] in the lab working on an assay. [The] next week I'd be making a presentation to potential investors. I've really gotten to do what the curriculum prepared us to do."