It looks like new MBA graduates may to be skipping the traditional asset manager route and jumping right into hedge funds, private equity and venture capital firms, WetFeet.com reports. While experienced managers have for some time been making the switch (and some more recently the switch back), the opportunities are knocking on the newbies' doors to help fill a growing demand, and it's a grad's market. With diploma in hand and dollar-signs in their eyes, they are starting to snub a career path that seems to lack the attractions of alternative investments, namely quick money and quick career opportunities. First-year MBA grads can start at about $110,000 annual salary, but as one recent grad told WetFeet, "I have friends who got half-a-million dollar bonus at hedge funds last year." Need more be said? WetFeet provided no statistics of grads or the alternatives firms that are hiring them, but don't be surprised if the average age at your firm takes a sudden turn for the young.

Need more proof of the trend? The New York Sun reports that about half of this year's graduating class of 800 at Harvard Business School want to take the school's venture capital/private equity course, though there is room for less than 200. "Almost 75%of HBS students want to do private equity or venture capital," Abhishek Agrawal, a student at the school told the Sun, "Only about 10% get to do it." The past two years saw about that percentage went into p.e. and VC, while half that percentage at Columbia Business School did the same.