Science or skill, theory or practice--business schools come to crossroads.

THE Master of Business Administration degree has long been regarded as the gold standard of business education. Generations of students have sat through hours of lectures on corporate finance and competitive theory', secure in the knowledge that it's their ticket to a swank, well-paid job at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. or McKinsey & Co.

Now there are signs the wheels may be coming off the MBA bus. The qualification is starting to have a passe feel to it. The MBA promoted a view of business as a science. Yet, business looks more like a skill these days--something learned from years of experience, not taught in a lecture hall.

The Graduate Management Admission Council conducts a survey that tracks the number of people applying to do an MBA. This year, 143 schools worldwide took part in the study.

The latest results suggest a steep decline in interest. GMAC found that 78 percent of schools offering traditional two-year courses received fewer applications in 2004. Among full-time, one-year programs, 67 percent reported a decline. And 48 percent of all part-time programs did the same.

To Henry Mintzberg, the drop in applications can't come quickly enough. A professor of management at McGill University in Montreal, he has just published a book called "Managers Not MBAs" that attacks much of the curriculum as irrelevant or even dangerous.

"Using the classroom to help develop people already practicing management is a fine idea, but pretending to create managers out of people who have never managed is a sham," he writes.

The central conceit of the MBA racket was that management was a science. The whole idea of the course was to arm graduates with a body of technical knowledge so they could go out and run just about any company.

In the current climate, that notion looks suspect. The great stock-market bubble of 1999/2000 threw up lots of companies and theories of the son that were popular in management books, but turned out to be nonsense.

Now, people are rightly cynical about grand talk. Ask them about "new paradigms," "land-grabs," or "first-mover advantage," and they'll start checking their wallets. Start talking to them about complex measurements of performance such as Ebitda (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) and they'll wonder why you can't just say whether the company made or lost money.

There were a lot of bad ideas that inflated the bubble--and many came out of business schools.

In reality, management is a skill, not a science. You learn it through years of accumulated wisdom and experience, not from time in the classroom.

The MBA will still have some value, but more as office decoration than a useful body of knowledge. The British civil service, in the days of the empire, used to employ armies of classicists, not because they particularly needed people who could speak fluent Latin and ancient Greek, but because anyone who could master so much dull and useless information could probably turn their hand to any complex task.

Likewise, anyone who can put up with the boredom and expense of an MBA will be a useful cog in any corporate machine.

But there is no point in pretending they can actually run anything.

Matthew Lynn is a columnist with Bloomberg News.