With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King? (article)

I don't think it's a bad thing at all.

Not just at the junior levels (undergrads and MBAs) but at the senior levels as well.

There needs to be a culture change on Wall Street. If that means a mass exodus to smaller firms (or folks exiting the business entirely), that may very well be a good (or even great) thing. It would mean less power concentrated in the hands of a few institutions (oligopoly) and a greater diversity of firms across the board so that there aren't firms that are "too big to fail". The advisory business will probably change as a result -- more boutiques like Moelis & Co., Greenhill, Blackstone M&A, etc. and other as-yet-to-be-started boutiques will gain. And the exodus could also mean new blood coming in that don't have the same expectations or mentality that their predecessors had. It may be the "end of Wall Street as we knew it" but not the end of Wall Street -- it will just be a different Wall Street. In fact, it was already quite different in the last 10-15 years compared to the 1980s.

Cleaning house and an exodus of incumbents is probably what is necessary anyhow.

This can also be a great thing for business schools themselves. One of the things that hurt a business school's value in the past has been the lack of diversity in the career choices of graduates. It's like the incoming classes are as a whole far more diverse in terms of pre-MBA careers than the outgoing classes (the lemming march towards finance and consulting).

The ideal is that there is no "king" or predominant path that MBAs take -- that the graduates go into all kinds of industries and occupations. That diversity only helps the breadth and value of an MBA, but it also minimizes that lemming march / herd mentality that is all to prevalent in b-schools.