The Post-Bubble Curriculum

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James Jiambalvo, dean of the Michael G. Foster School of Business at the University of Washington, says that while a number of the school's MBA courses are incorporating material relating to issues surrounding the subprime debacle, he's doubtful it will become a permanent staple of the curriculum. "It's topical, to be honest," Jiambalvo says. "If in your finance class you're talking about bubbles, this will go down in the list of bubbles. It's a good reminder that with markets there's a big psychological aspect. Unfortunately there's always some ethical scandal that makes a great case."

Meanwhile, Miami-Farmer Dean Roger Jenkins says he's surprised more schools aren't revamping their programs to include issues brought up by the subprime crisis. "I've been to a few deans' meetings and I haven't seen this create the urgency among my counterparts I'd expect."

The Housing Crisis: Another Bullet Point

Indeed, it's possible the subprime meltdown will fall into the category of events such as the Enron collapse and the tech market meltdown as bullet points to larger issues. "The subprime debacle is the latest in a long line of market events where prices have deviated from fundamentals," University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business Dean Michael Knetter commented in an e-mail. "No doubt there will be some episodes like this in the future, no matter what is taught in business schools. Our goal is to produce graduates not only able to anticipate such events but to protect against them."

Rakesh Khurana, associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the author of a recently published book critical of management education, says it's not clear how the issues raised by the subprime crisis will be framed in the curriculum. "We don't even have theories to describe this," Khurana says.

If past experience is a guide, Khurana adds, much of the discussion about the housing bubble will be shunted into business ethics courses, which he thinks is the wrong place. The lessons should be incorporated into financial control courses such as accounting and organizational behavior, and discussions about how short-term incentives—misguided ones in Khurana's view—affect people's risk-taking behavior.

But Khurana doesn't sound confident the subprime debacle will in itself prompt self-reflection at business schools. "Historically, the one moment that caused a reexamination of business schools was in the 1930s with the Great Depression. There was a great amount of hand-wringing and self-examination because of the financial chicanery that underlay the banking and insurance areas," he says. "That was the last sustained self-examination…that's no longer part of the discourse."

Mintz is BusinessWeek.com's B-schools channel editor in New York .