With the stock market taking a turn for the worse and an era of loosely regulated banking coming to an end, Haas School of Business and other business schools are re-evaluating their curriculums.

In light of this historical economic meltdown, some faculty members are saying that they foresee tailoring the school's offerings to adequately prepare business students to find a job.

"If you look at electives, then of course they need to be updated, whether it's a change in the structure and their relationships to the government, or whether there's going to be more or different types of regulations," said Jay Stowsky, senior assistant dean for instruction at Haas School of Business.

Christopher Lin, a junior in the business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi, said changing course curriculums is unlikely to increase students' chances of landing jobs.

"In terms of the curriculum, I don't think there's much any school can do," he said. "The nature of the industry is that jobs are going to be lost."

Since 2007, more than 250,000 jobs were lost in the financial sector up until August 2008, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc., a national job replacement service.

"We're encouraging people to have a serious plan B," said Ainka Fulani, the associate director of MBA career advising and programs at Haas. "I think students will be thinking more critically now whether they want to pursue opportunities in finance and investment banking firms."

Professors may place more weight on corporate responsibility in their research and teaching given the level of criticism of Wall Street for fiscal mismanagement.

"There might be more interest in seeing how these new and complicated financial instruments which started out as a way to better manage risk in the economy got mishandled in ways that just ended up spreading risk throughout the economy," Stowsky said.

While professors will readjust the content of their lectures given today's economic situation, Stowsky said core courses at Haas will stay about the same.

"Much of the undergraduate curriculum is fundamentals, so if you look at the core courses, they are pretty much going to remain the way they are," he said, adding that future curriculum may include a course assessing the financial meltdown.

Other business schools have already made plans to adjust their curriculums. Harvard Business School will be adding a seminar in 2009, focusing on the events preceding the collapse of the Bear Sterns Companies Inc., according to the school's administrative officials.

Despite the layoffs, Stowsky said he is optimistic UC Berkeley graduates can navigate the tough economic climate.

"Despite what's happening on Wall Street, there's still demand for smart people," he said. "We just placed 100 percent of our Master's in Financial Engineering students with internships for this summer."

Master's in Financial Engineering is a competitive one-year program that teaches 60 students how to apply a mathematical framework to real-world financial problems. Sixty-three percent of the program's 2007 graduates went into investment banking.

Pete Chromiak, a student currently enrolled in the program, said although some of his classmates won't get the positions they had originally hoped for, there is still a demand for strong quantitative reasoning skills.

"Obviously things are bad right now, but people are trying to take the opportunities they are presented with even if it's not their ultimate career goal," said Chromiak, who will be interning with Spot Trading, a small proprietary trading firm in Chicago.

Despite the number of job losses and the plummeting stock market, administration officials still project the same number of enrollment for the master's and undergraduate degree program.

"We have one of the most popular majors on campus, and I don't see that changing," Stowsky said. "At the MBA level, historically, applications go up in an economic downturn."

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