Amid Economic Carnage, Business Schools Mull Fixes

Until recently, the world's business schools have been largely sheltered from the gale force winds that have buffeted the global economy, but that's starting to change.
In and out of the classroom, business school professors and their students are struggling to make intellectual sense of a crisis few of them anticipated. Workable solutions remain elusive, but ideas are plentiful, particularly about the causes of the crisis—a perfect storm that saw the simultaneous collapse of the banking system, the bursting of the housing bubble, and the rapid evaporation of trillions of dollars in shareholder wealth.
At the same time, students themselves are confronting a stark new economic reality of their own. Burdened with debt and entering a market for MBA talent that's getting grimmer by the day, many are questioning their reasons for getting an MBA. "There's no way the economic crisis doesn't make every single person rethink what he or she wants to do and whether it's a good time to do it," says Guy Turner, a first-year student at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.