ABOUT a year before Adam Richman was to graduate from the Harvard Business School in 1996, he took on an extracurricular project. It was long before the Internet bubble inflated and burst, and well before one of the school's graduates landed in the White House. Mr. Richman wondered: What was the real-world value of a master's in business administration, especially one from the iviest of Ivies? Was it, as widely perceived, an ace in the hole, a get-out-of-jail-free card, a ticket to the good life?

To that end, Mr. Richman decided to track a core group of his Harvard classmates, to converse with them about their personal and professional aspirations, and then to revisit them every five years until 2026. He also decided to film them along the way, à la "7 Up," Michael Apted's celebrated documentary series, which chronicled the lives of the same 14 people every seven years.

"I wanted to know how students made their career and leadership decisions, how they defined success," said Mr. Richman, 36, the co-founder of Double Nickel Entertainment, a television and film production company. His academic adviser, Monica C. Higgins, an associate professor at the business school, became a consultant for the series, titled "Building Career Foundations," which she uses for case-study work in her classroom.

"We're very interested in how external shocks affect careers — like 9/11, the dot-com boom and bust — and this class was right before the dot-com boom," said Professor Higgins, 41. "We wondered: 'How do people make the decision to drop everything and go after a dream? Who makes those type of choices and why?' People ask alums, 'What was the most important class you took in school?' But the real test comes once you're out."