NEW YORK—Early last year, the exhibition School Days at the Tilton Gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side publicly embraced—in fact celebrated—what has long been a quiet practice: art dealers mining the Master of Fine Arts programs at Yale, Columbia and other high-profile schools in hopes of discovering rising talent. The show won praise for the quality of the work on view, but it also drew the ire of critics who rebuked the gallery for offering artists early but fast-burning success in an overheated art market, and worse, encouraging so much young talent to tailor work to the tastes of the marketplace.

No matter which side of this debate one falls on, the exhibition made it clear that the MFA degree has become an increasingly important credential for emerging artists courting attention from dealers and collectors. This spring, as major academic programs host open studios and thesis exhibitions, another crop of artists begins vying for success in a cash-flush art world. But does this mean the MFA is on the road to becoming a necessary professional qualification analogous to a lawyer’s J.D.? Despite the degree’s rising importance, it’s still unclear how much weight dealers, especially those who regularly offer emerging artists their first solo exhibitions, actually place on it.

L.A. boasts some of the most talked about MFA programs in the country—CalArts, Art Center, UCLA—and the city’s art scene has a reputation for being dominated by them. But Caryn Coleman, co-owner of and director of Sixspace, a gallery in Culver City, tries not to let a big-name degree influence her eye. “Half of the artists that I show have a degree, and half do not,” she said. “The difference is negligible.”

She is quick to add, though, that as a dealer she likes the professional approach to making art that academic programs can foster, and would like to see even more of it. “Professionalization is a positive thing,” she said. “The more professional the artist, the more easily she can navigate the art world.”

But an interest in professional dedication is why New York gallerist Edward Winkleman is not recruiting emerging artists at this year’s open studios. “I don't personally believe in giving shows to people who are still in school,” he said. “There may have been a few exceptions, but I want an artist to make the decision to do this with their life—to set up a studio and devote themselves to producing work.”

When he is introduced to new artists, Winkleman said he has relatively little interest in if or where the artist has done an MFA. “It’s about the 20th thing down the list that I ask,” he said, but he doesn’t deny the impact of a degree program on an artist’s style. “If someone tells me which program they have gone through, I will have a good idea of how it influences their work. And looking at a work, I can probably say which program the artist went through,” he said.

Though he clarified, “I show three or four artists who came out of SVA, and stylistically, they’re all very distinct.”

The threat of MFA homogeneity also bothers Brook Bartlett, owner of the Outrageous Look gallery on the south side of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. “Art is sort of becoming a profession, like journalism,” she said. “I can’t help but think that it encourages putting the cart before the horse. Nothing in the studio gets made without a sense of where it will be shown. It’s all hooked into the commercial world.”

Bartlett also worries about what the increasing importance of degree programs will mean for galleries. “I think dealers have become like clearing houses for work determined by the institutions,” she said. “It leaves little room for startling things to happen suddenly.”

Priska C. Juschka, a dealer who exhibits many emerging artists in her 27th Street space in Manhattan, has a more pragmatic assessment of the market intertwining with the MFA. “Given the situation in New York City, the proximity to Chelsea is just a factor [for students],” she said. “It’s impossible to think about art here without it.”

Juschka regularly canvasses local art programs in search of strong work by young artists, and she has even held solo exhibitions of artists who had not yet graduated from school. A show of painter Emily Noelle Lambert’s work, for example, just closed on April 28. “She is still at Hunter College, and I came across her work a year and a half ago at the open studios there,” said Juschka.

Winkleman, meanwhile, believes he has found a compromise between promoting emerging artists and pulling them into the market prematurely. On April 25, he turned his gallery over to Yes (to Everything), the thesis exhibition for RISD's photography MFA program. “One of the students sent me an e-mail saying that they were looking for a venue for a show,” he said. “It’s not something I would have considered, but I saw the SVA show at David Zwirner last fall, and I thought it was a very good way for a dealer to give something back.”