As the Higher Education Bubble continues bursting, even elite schools are being spattered.

Case-in-point: As students opt to follow more technology-based programs, the application numbers for one of America’s most prestigious business schools have dropped steeply.

Something at Wharton doesn’t add up.

Applications to the University of Pennsylvania’s business school have declined 12% in the past four years, with the M.B.A. program receiving just 6,036 submissions for the class that started this fall. That was fewer than Stanford Graduate School of Business, with a class half Wharton’s size.

Wharton says the decline, combined with a stronger applicant pool and a higher percentage of accepted applicants who enroll, proves that the school is doing a better job targeting candidates.

But business-school experts and b-school applicants say Wharton has lost its luster as students’ interests shift from finance to technology and entrepreneurship.

“We’re hearing [applicants say] Stanford, Harvard or nothing. It used to be Stanford, Harvard or Wharton,” says Jeremy Shinewald, the founder of mbaMission, an admissions advisory firm.

Wharton over the past century built its reputation as a training ground for Wall Street titans, but the financial crisis closed off many paths to such careers. The school in the mid-2000s regularly sent more than a quarter of its students to jobs at investment banks and brokerage firms. That figure has slid into the teens….

Dan Lee says he briefly considered Wharton but instead focused on schools that he believed had stronger general management training. Wharton is “typecast as the finance school,” he says. For Mr. Lee, a first-year student at Dartmouth College’s Tuck School of Business, “going to business school was not about going into the financial sector.”

Virgil Archer says he wanted “a frothy tech scene.” Mr. Archer, who is in his first year at the University of California, Los Angeles, Anderson School of Management, says Wharton didn’t have the same entrepreneurial atmosphere.