Business schools are a relatively young phenomenon in higher education and they have enjoyed a charmed life of rapid growth. Their quintessential product, the MBA, is awarded to hundreds of thousands of students a year worldwide. In the US alone, more than a hundred thousand MBAs graduate annually. But all good things come to an end. It may prove a tragic irony for business schools that just as they began to feel that they had finally won their quest for respectability, they were implicated as a key player in the financial tsunami from which the world is now striving to extricate itself.

The responsibility for the crisis in the banking sector that led to our current economic woes leads back from Wall Street to the leading US business schools. Where do bankers and other business leaders learn the attitudes and ideas which inform how they think and act? The uncomfortable fact for business schools, is that the career choice of recent years for graduates from top schools was Wall Street, the City of London and lucrative careers in private equity, hedge funds, investment banking and management consulting. Indeed it is the dream of such careers that lures people to do an MBA in the first place. MBAs sell themselves as the pathway to riches.