More than a year into the greatest economic upheaval, the world is a changed new place. Millions of jobs have disappeared, many of them never to be back. Trillions of dollars in shareholder wealth have gone up in smoke. And the business world is struggling to come to grips with a radically new economic climate where risk is, well, a four-letter word.
When business school students return to class next month, they'll find their academic world a changed place, too. There will be new classes for some—classes designed to give MBA students an understanding of the crisis and its causes. Existing courses in risk management, macroeconomics, and other crisis-related topics will be far more popular than they ever were. Ethics will play a bigger role than it did just a year ago. And in a few cases, entirely new programs will spring to life.
To be sure, some of the changes were in the works long before the first stress fractures appeared and the economy began to crumble. And individually few of them will make headlines. But collectively they amount to the beginning of what may be the most significant rethinking of the B-school curriculum since the spate of curriculum overhauls that followed the collapse of Enron.
The B-school response to the economic crisis is as varied as the schools themselves. For many, the financial crisis is serving as a catalyst for self-examination. These schools are using it as an opportunity to tweak, and augment, both curricular and extracurricular offerings.
A few schools are going so far as as introducing whole new crisis-themed programs.
