Tom Starin doesn’t begin to meet most recruiters’ expectations of the perfect M.B.A. candidate. Unlike most M.B.A. students, he has almost no work experience besides summer internships. He graduated just this spring from Pennsylvania State University, with a bachelor’s degree in meteorology and a minor in global business strategy.

Even so, Mr. Starin made a big impression on admission officials at the University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business Administration, where he is starting his studies this fall. His high Graduate Management Admission Test score (710) certainly helped. But what really made the 22-year-old applicant stand out was a successful online baseball-card trading venture. While at Penn State, he earned returns of $2,000 to $3,000 a year on an average investment of $3,000 to $4,000 a year in baseball cards. “In effect, I started my own little arbitrage business,” Mr. Starin says. He bought cards of players once their teams were eliminated in postseason games and sold them at times of peak excitement, such as opening day in the spring.

“This guy is going to be a winner,” says Mark Zupan, the Simon School’s dean. “He has entrepreneurial zeal, creativity and a can-do attitude.” All of which, the dean believes, overcomes Mr. Starin’s lack of traditional work experience.

Though many recruiters remain wary, more business schools are admitting students either straight out of college or after only a year or two in the workplace. Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, for example, is developing a “life-sciences scholars” program that accepts undergraduate science majors right into the M.B.A. program. If the business school had a strict work-experience policy, officials there say, they would risk losing top-caliber undergraduates who can proceed directly to medical or law school.

“The schools see the talented people we’ve missed, but the recruiters don’t,” says Edward Snyder, dean of the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. To try to ensure that it doesn’t keep missing those great catches, Dean Snyder’s school has established the GSB Scholars program. Chicago undergraduates can apply to the M.B.A. program in their senior year. If they are provisionally admitted, they must then get two to three years of “substantive” work experience before starting classes.