Business schools have been battered by criticism for the role they played in the global financial meltdown.

Some charge that the values imparted in MBA programmes – maximising shareholder value and personal gain, for instance – put too much emphasis on making money and too little on social considerations.

Others say business schools do not train students properly to understand the limitations of the financial models used in the classroom. Still others claim that business schools have done nothing to foster accountability in students.

Deans are taking note. On campuses throughout the US and Europe, schools are making adjustments – both large and small – to their curriculums, from tweaking their course content to introducing new classes and seminars and even new degrees, in an effort to convey the lessons of the economic crisis to their students.

“Every business school is thinking: what can we learn from this?” says John Fernandes, president and chief executive of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business, the US-based accreditation body.

“Schools are putting together courses on the history of financial crises and revamping their classes on ethics.

“Some schools have even started new degree programmes.”

Insead, for instance, is launching a new joint degree with various public policy schools. The degree will enable its students to obtain a joint MBA/MPA in two years. Although the idea to offer this kind of degree had been in the works for a while, the crisis accelerated the school's plans, according to Jake Cohen, dean of the MBA programme at Insead.

The legacy of this economic crisis is that the public and private sectors will be much more closely tied and business schools must prepare students for this economic reality, says Prof Cohen.

“This crisis has bridged the two sectors,” he says. “I don't see it as a fad. This will be with us for a while. It's very important for MBA students to understand the public sector, to understand how government creates laws and how that impacts the ability of companies to do well, or not to do well.”

Harvard Business School has added new courses about the financial crisis. “The lesson coming out of this crisis is that we – and by we I mean companies, policymakers, regulators – underestimated the level of systemic risk,” says Jay Light, the outgoing dean of the school. “We also gave too little thought to how things could go wrong.”

In September, HBS introduced several new elective courses, including “managing the modern financial firm” and “the evolution of the US financial system”, aimed at giving second-year students a deeper understanding of risk management in the financial markets. The school also added new material about the failure of Bear Stearns, the defunct investment bank, to its required course for first-year students.

Some schools are revamping their curriculums around the study of ethics. For example, Cass Business School in London recently undertook a large-scale review conducted by a committee comprised of professors, administrators, students and external advisers, to look at how ethics is taught across the curriculum.

According to Chizu Nakajima, director of the Centre for Financial Regulation and Crime at Cass, the committee recommended the school take an “integrated” approach to ethics and sustainability, as opposed to attaching a separate module on “ethics” to each programme and that every member of faculty and professional staff participate in an ongoing programme of dialogue about what “good” looks like in business and the public sector.