Say one of your rising stars wants to enroll in a six-month training class for executives that is being given at a prestigious business school. It means she will have to miss work every other Friday. (No problem.) But it will also cost your company $14,000. (Gulp.) Should you sign off?

This is a decision that managers and human-resources execs are often asked to make. A growing number of universities offer short-term-learning programs that appeal to up-and-coming executives looking to hone their management, finance, or marketing skills. Many schools have seen double-digit enrollment increases over the past five years, which has encouraged other institutions to join the fray.

University-based executive education is a $400 million business that has increased an estimated 30 percent a year, according to Josh Bersin, chief executive of Bersin & Associates, a research firm in Oakland, California, that tracks corporate spending in the areas of leadership and talent development. This year, the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona, derived 39 percent, or $23 million, of its revenue from corporate students, up from 14 percent, or $7 million, in 2002. At Harvard Business School, executive education accounts for 22 percent of overall revenue, slightly more than the 20 percent generated by the full-time M.B.A. program.

A brief spell of nondegree study at a school with a distinguished name may appeal to an executive's pride and intellectual curiosity, but what are the true advantages? Those may have less to do with education than with career development. Executives who attend such quick-hit education programs "feel singled out and are given the message ‘I must be special,'" says Jim Dean, senior associate dean of academic affairs at the University of North Carolina's Kenan-Flagler Business School. "That gesture alone helps instill a sense of commitment." And companies can benefit by increasing the number of candidates in their leadership pipeline. "Someone might be a star in the sales area but deficient in marketing. These programs can provide excellent cross-function skills training," Bersin says.

Susan Schott, a senior director at the specialty-pharmaceutical company Hospira, a spinoff of Abbott Laboratories that's based in Lake Forest, Illinois, is grateful that her bosses said yes. Last year, she enrolled in a six-month executive-education program called the Management Institute at the University of Chicago School of Business. The courses consumed every other Friday and three full Saturdays for Schott and her 35 classmates, some of whom flew in from Denver, Dallas, and Baltimore  to attend. The wide-ranging curriculum covered accounting and financial analysis, negotiation, and decision-making strategies and skills for managing an international workforce. The homework is steady but manageable, she says.

Schott, who never attended business school (her undergraduate degree is in mechanical engineering), says the practical yet intellectually challenging content "scratched an itch" she'd had for years. "Taking the class was great for my morale and my sense of engagement with the company," she says, adding that the experience also made her a sharper manager. "My views are broader. I have a greater awareness of global issues."

And that's crucial to her job as an R&D program director, which involves overseeing 25 people in offices as far away as England and Australia. Her duties include assessing the value proposition of new products for the company. She frequently trots out applicable case studies from the course to share with her colleagues when comparable R&D or management issues come up at work. Her boss has noticed a difference too. "He told me that I ask better questions now."

More and more business schools are offering executive-education programs. One sign of that growth is that membership in the International University Consortium for Executive Education has doubled over the past 15 years and now extends to 90 schools, including Duke, Emory, and Stanford.

"Our goal is to deliver superb programs. They are more than just perks," says the consortium's executive director, Bill Scheurer. "Executives don't have a lot of time, so we have to offer something that can be a strategic tool."