Every day now, students in Fairfield University Professor Michael Tucker’s finance class are witnesses to history.
From his classroom, Tucker and his students have been watching the stock market on a big board ticker with up-to-the-minute data from Reuters. The ticker runs during every class, so Tucker’s students have watched firsthand the market’s recent wild gyrations.
“We’ve had the unhappy experience of watching the market tank on a couple of afternoons,” Tucker said.
The recent carnage on Wall Street and the struggles of banks worldwide present a tough challenge for Connecticut’s business schools, now faced with the duty of teaching the economic crisis as it continues to unfold. There is a concentrated effort to bring students up to speed on the causes of and possible solutions to what many have labeled the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The stakes are especially high for many Connecticut students who have their sights set on Wall Street after graduation.
With the economy making front page news virtually every day, Central Connecticut State University School of Business professor Sarah Stookey set up subscriptions to The New York Times for her students at the start of the fall semester.
“For many of my students, they don’t read any newspaper on a regular basis,” Stookey said. “I think they were fascinated to see it unfolding day by day. There is always some new development to discuss, so it works out very well as a way to address the concepts I want to address.”
The big focus for the business schools is dealing with how the economy crumbled in the first place and how a similar meltdown can be avoided in the future. Tucker said he has placed an emphasis on company valuation to better analyze the actual worth of investments.
“We’re getting to the point where we’re valuing real companies with real data, which is very complicated,” Tucker said.
Regulation Pros And Cons
Stookey, who teaches a course on ethical and social issues for managers, said the economic crisis has brought a renewed focus on the pros and cons of a regulated market versus a deregulated market. The recent efforts toward more regulation underscore how perceptions of appropriate economic practices can change quickly.
“It’s useful to see the way that business is always occurring within a social context and the rules and expectations of business are constantly changing,” Stookey said.
Lin Klein, associate dean of the University of Connecticut’s business school, said she has not specifically changed the agenda for the basic curriculum course she teaches, but instead uses current events to highlight business principles. When the federal government announced a couple of weeks ago its plans to inject $250 billion into banks, Klein tied that news into her discussion about preferred stock.
“We talked about that because it’s a core finance concept, and I can relate it to the government buy-in of banks,” Klein said. “By preferred stock, we’re talking about what that means in terms of voting rights.”
Since the presidential election is apt to directly influence the future of the national and world economies, professors are leading discussions about the candidates’ respective economic platforms. Professors said they are careful to take an objective look at their proposed policies without endorsing either candidate or letting politics enter the discussion.
The hope is that students learning about the economic crisis now will have the knowledge and perspective to avoid creating in the future a similar environment of reckless lending and spending that led to the current troubles. That is the silver lining, if any does exist, Stookey said.
Tight market
“What’s been wonderful is the crisis highlights the significance of different approaches to the economy,” Stookey said. “In the past, I’ve taught about things like the relationship between market and state. It hasn’t seemed at all immediate and vivid as it does now.”
There is concern among graduating students, however, that the market for financial sector jobs will be extremely tight. Business schools are urging students to be aggressive in their job search and perhaps consider other career paths in the corporate world beyond Wall Street.
“I hope they understand the value of their skills, even if they are not on Wall Street,” said Tucker of Fairfield University, where 29 percent of students who graduated last year went into financial-sector jobs. “Companies want people who can start work today. If they can demonstrate a skill level, then they will be more employable.”
