By KELLEY HOLLAND


The master’s of business administration, a gateway credential throughout corporate America, is especially coveted on Wall Street; in recent years, top business schools have routinely sent more than 40 percent of their graduates into the world of finance.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

“It is so obvious that something big has failed,”said Angel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Arizona.“We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say,‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

Critics of business education have many complaints. Some say the schools have become too scientific, too detached from real-world issues. Others say students are taught to come up with hasty solutions to complicated problems. Another group contends that schools give students a limited and distorted view of their role - that they graduate with a focus on maximizing shareholder value and only a limited understanding of ethical and social considerations essential to business leadership.

Such shortcomings may have left business school graduates inadequately prepared to make the decisions that, taken together, might have helped mitigate the financial crisis, critics say.

“There are extraordinary things taking place in business education, and a lot that is very promising,”said Judith F.Samuelson, executive director of the Business and Society Program at the Aspen Institute.“But what’s the central theorem of business education? It’s wanting.”

Some employers and recruiters also question the value of an M.B.A., and are telling young people they can get better training on the job than in business school. A growing number are setting up programs to help employees develop skills in-house.

On many campuses, changes are under way in courses and curriculums. Some schools are heightening their focus on long-term thinking or leadership, and many are adding seminars to address the economic crisis.

Jay O.Light, the dean of Harvard Business School, argues that there have been imbalances both on campuses and in the economy.“We lived through an enormous extended period of financial good times, and people became less focused on risks and risk management and more focused on making money,”he said.“We need to move that focus back toward the center.”

Business schools have looked inward before . In the late 1950s, reports commissioned by the Ford and Carnegie foundations recommended that business become a true profession, with a code of conduct and an ideology about its role in society. But this idea didn’t get much traction, according to Rakesh Khurana, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of“From Higher Aims to Hired Hands,”a historical analysis of business education.

Business schools, he said, never really taught their students that, like doctors and lawyers, they were part of a profession. And in the 1970s, he said, the idea took hold that a company’s stock price was the primary barometer of success, which changed the schools’ concept of proper management techniques.

Instead of being viewed as long-term economic stewards, he said, managers came to be seen mainly as the agents of the owners - the shareholders - and responsible for maximizing shareholder wealth.

“A kind of market fundamentalism took hold in business education,”Professor Khurana said.“The new logic of shareholder primacy absolved management of any responsibility for anything other than financial results.”