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It was a neat trick, but Berkeley needn't resort to such ploys in this booming market. Real estate has become the new dot-com at many business schools. Despite warnings that the housing bubble might burst, M.B.A. students are packing real-estate finance, strategy and investment classes.

For some, it means a promising new career path. "There's been a sea change as more real-estate companies seek M.B.A. talent they can groom for positions in senior management," says Nancy Wallace, a Berkeley professor. "They're looking for people who understand the capital markets and can help them hedge their risks."

At the same time, the frothy market is driving some students to learn more about real estate in hopes of making a killing through personal investments. They figure they can do their day job and spend their evenings getting rich flipping real-estate assets.

Whatever the students' motivation, M.B.A. interest in real estate is clearly hotter than ever. About 200 of the 240 second-year M.B.A.s at Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business signed up for the real-estate elective during the last school year, forcing Tuck to add more sections. The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania expects 4.5% of the class of 2005 to land jobs in real estate, up from 2.7% last year. And at the Anderson School at the University of California, Los Angeles, the real-estate club's membership has quadrupled to 125 since 2001.

Ronnie Gul, the club president, estimates that nearly half of the members will pursue real-estate careers, while many of the others are "speculative, trying to get into the game after hearing about home prices doubling overnight." The club's career night this year attracted a mix of some 30 homebuilders, lenders and commercial developers, and resulted in several job offers, including an internship for Mr. Gul at Mesa West Capital.

Real-estate companies, which have often played second fiddle to banks and consulting firms, welcome a bigger selection of M.B.A. applicants. "We're seeing very keen student interest in our company with the industry so healthy and getting a lot of media publicity," says Laura Adams, vice president, human resources, at Jones Lang LaSalle, a real-estate-services and investment-management firm.

The company plans to spread a wider net for class of 2006 graduates. It has typically hired M.B.A.s into its Chicago headquarters from the hometown business schools at Northwestern University and the University of Chicago. Now, many of its other U.S. offices want M.B.A. students with strong problem-solving and leadership abilities, too. So it expects to start recruiting at such schools as Harvard University and the University of Southern California.

Undergraduates also have been bitten by the real-estate bug. The number of undergraduate real-estate majors at the University of Wisconsin at Madison has risen by 50% in the past four years, says Tim Riddiough, director of the school's real-estate center. But he calls the undergraduate demand partly "a Donald Trump reality-show effect," whereas M.B.A. students tend to be more strongly committed to the real-estate industry.

Indeed, Holt Lunsford, president of Dallas-based Holt Lunsford Commercial, says he prefers M.B.A.s to undergraduates because they're more experienced with a better sense of their ultimate career goals. "M.B.A.s are more likely to stay with us," he explains. "Undergraduates may change their minds and leave after we've invested three years in training them."

Not all of the students in real-estate classes are prospective hires for Mr. Lunsford and other recruiters. Cem Sibay, a recent Dartmouth graduate, purchased a duplex house near campus with his girlfriend and then decided he could benefit from a real-estate course. "I needed a little more insight into real estate than just 'location, location, location,' " he says. "My goal was to learn the correct methods to model and evaluate real-estate investments and to understand tax-related issues." Although he's moving to Seattle to work in business development for Amazon.com, he plans to hang on to the duplex in Hanover, N.H., and muses that he might even make real estate his second career someday.

Will real-estate courses lose their allure if the market takes a dive? The major schools expect some falloff in enrollment but nothing precipitous. That's partly because real estate is becoming a much more entrenched part of M.B.A. programs as the number of courses and case studies continues to grow. Schools also are creating real-estate research centers and sponsoring professional conferences, and more M.B.A.s are participating in national real-estate competitions to test their finance, design and development skills.

"No matter where you decide to go in life, you are bound to encounter real-estate issues," says Georgette Poindexter, who heads Wharton's real-estate department. "People have woken up and realized that they have neglected this major asset. Now, M.B.A.s tell me they feel that they have to get some real estate under their belts, whether in entrepreneurship, investments or another class."

-- Mr. Alsop is a Wall Street Journal news editor and senior writer. He also is the editor of "The Wall Street Journal Guide to Business Schools: Recruiters' Top Picks" (2004) and author of the recent book, "The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation: Creating, Protecting, and Repairing Your Most Valuable Asset" (Wall Street Journal Books/Free Press 2004). For more information about 'The 18 Immutable Laws of Corporate Reputation," visit Wall Street Journal Books.