For MBAs, a Post-Crisis Curriculum

When B-school students arrive on campus this year, they'll find new classes and new programs—all pegged to the global meltdown

By Rachel Z. Arndt

More than a year into the greatest economic upheaval since the Great Depression, the world is a changed place. Millions of jobs have disappeared, many of them never to return. 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.

Catalyst for Change

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.

Although ethics has always been a part of curriculum at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management (MIT Sloan Full-Time MBA Profile), it may soon gain a larger presence. The school is testing what it calls an "ethics module"—not an entire class, but a synthesis of the ethics taught in other business classes. The sessions are currently optional, but may soon become required, says Deputy Dean JoAnne Yates. Likewise, at Dartmouth, the Tuck School of Business (Tuck Full-Time MBA Profile) will add a required ethics and social responsibility class this fall, though the course was in the works before the crisis struck. This year's incoming class will also have to take a leadership course.

Faculty at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business (Chicago Booth Full-Time MBA Profile) are taking a different approach. In addition to a new course on ethics and several others, they're tackling the crisis head-on, introducing an in-depth analysis of financial crises—past and present—in a new class for the upcoming academic year, "The Analytics of Financial Crises." Some classes will be getting new teachers, too. When the new academic year starts, Randall Kroszner will take over for Phillip Swagel, former Assistant Treasury Secretary, in teaching Booth's "Money and Banking" class. Kroszner's qualifications for the bringing the crisis to life in the classroom are impeccable. As a member of the Council of Economic Advisers under President Bush, he helped formulate the policy response to the post-Enron governance scandals, and as a Fed governor until January he chaired a committee on banking regulation and helped develop the policy response to the current crisis.

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