Recently, some business schools have even taken to dropping the tainted e-terminology altogether. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill renamed its eUNC e-commerce center the Center for Technology and Advanced Commerce. The University of California at Irvine, which advertises itself as the "M.B.A. for the Networked Economy," changed one of its course titles from "Electronic Commerce" to "Electronic Business" to avoid any negative dot-com stigma. Even so, enrollment has plummeted. Kevin Zhu, a professor of information technology at Irvine, worries "that now we're swinging to the other extreme. I tell students that e-commerce may be down, but it's definitely not out."

To be sure, e-commerce is very much alive and well at some schools, notably Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, with its master's of electronic commerce, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., with its "super concentration" in e-commerce and information technology. One-quarter of 282 schools responding to a survey last spring offer e-business concentrations in their M.B.A. programs, according to AACSB International, the organization that accredits business schools. Nearly 20% award certificates in e-business; about 10%, specialized master's degrees; 8.9%, bachelor's degrees; and 2.6%, doctoral degrees.

"We aren't looking for e-commerce courses as a requirement for employment," says Michael Collins, a vice president and e-commerce expert in Chicago for the Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Co. "We focus on M.B.A. students' analytical and problem-solving skills, their results orientation and passion for our clients' success. We're well-equipped to teach our folks about technology over time."

IN 1999, the M.B.A. course "E-Business Strategies" was as hot as a high-tech IPO.

It was so popular, in fact, that University of Chicago M.B.A. students were required to show their I.D.s to get through the classroom door. School monitors were on the lookout for gate-crashers because only 60 of the 220 students who tried to register for the class had been admitted.

Two years later, there's so little interest in the course that it has been dropped.

"The frenzy was driven by the stock market and students who viewed the Internet as a gold mine," says Steven Kaplan, professor of finance and entrepreneurship at Chicago. "This year, our students are showing better sense, and there's more interest in broader courses on technology and entrepreneurship."

Such is the experience of many business schools that cooked up electronic-commerce courses to feed feverish student demand. Now, many of the classes that were once bursting at the seams are going the way of so many failed dot-coms.

With student interest waning, the University of Michigan Business School already has dumped its "E-Finance" course and is debating whether to keep "E-Commerce Law and Ethics" and another course with the wishful but hopelessly outdated title "Idea to IPO in 14 Weeks." Michigan administrators felt intense pressure two years ago from both students and alumni to instantly develop an e-commerce curriculum. "There was a time," recalls Susan Ashford, senior associate dean for academic affairs, "when there were more e-business events inside and outside the classroom than you could ever attend."

Recently, some business schools have even taken to dropping the tainted e-terminology altogether. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill renamed its eUNC e-commerce center the Center for Technology and Advanced Commerce. The University of California at Irvine, which advertises itself as the "M.B.A. for the Networked Economy," changed one of its course titles from "Electronic Commerce" to "Electronic Business" to avoid any negative dot-com stigma. Even so, enrollment has plummeted. Kevin Zhu, a professor of information technology at Irvine, worries "that now we're swinging to the other extreme. I tell students that e-commerce may be down, but it's definitely not out."

To be sure, e-commerce is very much alive and well at some schools, notably Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, with its master's of electronic commerce, and Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., with its "super concentration" in e-commerce and information technology. One-quarter of 282 schools responding to a survey last spring offer e-business concentrations in their M.B.A. programs, according to AACSB International, the organization that accredits business schools. Nearly 20% award certificates in e-business; about 10%, specialized master's degrees; 8.9%, bachelor's degrees; and 2.6%, doctoral degrees.

Still, many business-school deans and professors are relieved they didn't create a special major or degree and recruit a bunch of high-priced professors with e-commerce credentials. Deans recall that they faced the same issues -- and made the same judgment -- when international business, mergers and acquisitions, and total quality management were all the rage in the past 15 years.

"Now that the e-commerce bandwagon is toppling, we don't have to worry about running away from the wreckage," says Elliott Weiss, associate dean at the University of Virginia's Darden School, which rejected a proposal for an e-commerce specialization a couple of years ago.

Many deans and professors consider the Internet to be much like electricity or telecommunications -- a central part of such business operations as marketing and supply-chain management, but not an academic discipline. "No one would expect a business school to have a degree on `Managing in the World of the Telephone' or `Marketing in the World of the Printing Press,'" says Michael Katz, who was chairman of the committee for e-commerce in the curriculum at the University of California at Berkeley.

Even schools like Berkeley near the heart of the action in Silicon Valley are toning down the e-commerce emphasis. This year, enrollment in e-commerce classes has fallen at Berkeley's Haas School of Business as students go back to basics -- corporate finance, new-product development, marketing research -- in hopes of landing a job during the economic downturn. The number of entries in its new-business-plan competition last spring fell 50%. And the school expects demand for its e-commerce classes to be down "moderately to significantly" next spring, depending on the specific course.

But Berkeley isn't shaken because it took a measured approach to e-commerce. For instance, it hired recently retired executives and local consultants to teach some of its e-commerce classes rather than tenure-track professors. When it came to e-commerce, "our judgment was that this, too, will pass," says Andrew Shogan, associate dean for instruction.

Now, Berkeley and other schools are integrating e-commerce lessons and case studies on companies, ranging from the defunct online grocer Webvan to Cisco Systems Inc., into core courses on operations management, marketing, technology and strategy, while keeping a few e-commerce electives -- at least for now. "E-commerce should be interwoven into the curriculum as much as managerial accounting was when I was in business school," says John Flato, national director of university relations at the consulting firm Cap Gemini Ernst & Young.

E-commerce courses that survive focus more on the Internet's role at brick-and-mortar companies; the dot-com content includes mostly case studies about what went wrong at some of the defunct start-ups. But many of those cases aren't all that fascinating because they tell the same tale: Sales didn't grow fast enough, and the dot-com ran out of cash.

At the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, the core course "Strategic Analysis of Technology Systems" is about one-third e-commerce-oriented this year, but it's much less about entrepreneurs than in the past. Alva Taylor, who teaches the course, plans case studies on e-business units inside companies like Procter & Gamble Co. and Hilton Hotels Corp. and the issues of change and transition in such traditional organizations. But he also will include a few cases on Internet survivors, such as Participate.com, a manager of online communities, which include chatrooms and discussion boards.

"When Tuck revised its curriculum last year, we stressed that the core course on technology would not be an e-commerce course," says Mr. Taylor. "We focus on the Internet as part of how you do business across all areas, not as a stand-alone subject."

Some business schools never intended for their e-commerce programs to last long from the start. Stanford University established its Center for Electronic Business and Commerce in 1999 with $20 million in funding and a five-year sunset provision. In the meantime, the center expects to develop teaching materials and spark e-commerce research across many academic disciplines. But Stanford fully believes that e-commerce is much more than the flavor of the month, as some business schools call it. In fact, Stanford held a seminar in September titled, "Don't Bury E-Commerce Just Yet."

Far from being buried, e-commerce is still a strong presence at a few business schools. Last spring, Cornell University developed a "total-immersion curriculum in e-business" with the help of a $1 million grant from Corning Inc., but concedes that it is still trying to stir up more interest among its M.B.A. students.

And the University of Maryland, which boasts that it has offered some 50 e-commerce courses, recently added an e-management concentration and the Center for E-Service.

"The gold-rush phase of the Internet revolution is over," says Roland Rust, the center's director. "Now, companies need to make a profit, and that means understanding and serving customers."

Vanderbilt, the e-commerce pioneer among business schools, is no less enthusiastic than when it offered its first course called "Marketing in Computer-Mediated Environments" in 1994. The school's latest venture is eLab, which allows students and professors to study the behavior of consumers as they navigate simulated e-commerce sites.

"We believe an e-commerce curriculum is more important than ever," says William Christie, dean of Vanderbilt's Owen Graduate School of Management. "The dot-com failures showed that this isn't child's play and that our students need to experiment in the eLab to learn what models work and don't work on the Internet."

Even now, more Vanderbilt students specialize in e-commerce than any other field except finance. However, more are choosing it not as a single major but as part of a double major with another subject.

Emile Karam, co-president of Vanderbilt's e-commerce student club, likes the "real-world content" of many of his classes. For example, he is part of a team analyzing problems and challenges at Net2Phone Inc., a provider of Internet-based telephone services, and developing a strategy to make it profitable.

"No matter what my job or how big my company," says Mr. Karam, "I know I'm going to face some e-commerce problems."

But the bottom-line question for Mr. Karam and other M.B.A. students is whether an e-commerce major or degree will make them more marketable. Perhaps, but many corporate recruiters view e-commerce courses as mere icing and are wary of faddish majors.

"We aren't looking for e-commerce courses as a requirement for employment," says Michael Collins, a vice president and e-commerce expert in Chicago for the Boston-based consulting firm Bain & Co. "We focus on M.B.A. students' analytical and problem-solving skills, their results orientation and passion for our clients' success. We're well-equipped to teach our folks about technology over time."

At Hallmark Cards Inc.'s Hallmark.com unit, however, an e-commerce specialization carries more weight. Len White, a recruiter for Hallmark.com and Vanderbilt alumnus, says he is much more likely to consider students with e-commerce experience, whether through coursework or an internship.

"Some degree of formal training in e-commerce," he says, "means that a new hire will be more successful right out of the starting gate."

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Mr. Alsop is a Wall Street Journal news editor in New York.