Writing a guest editorial in the Washington Post, the MBA Oath’s Peter Escher tackles the issue of how the perception of the roles of financier and manager has evolved at business schools.

At our lunch of burritos at a local Qdoba (Greg is more accomplished than glamorous), he was questioning the social stratification we encountered at business school. As he saw it, financiers were at the top, and then there was everyone else. Because of the heavy curricular emphasis on finance and accounting, the students who had managed money and knew financial modeling were often deemed the smartest. Socially, they were the ones you wanted to network with. Students who had “merely” managed people, products, brands, and even non-profits were lumped together in the lower echelons.

Has the MBA shifted away dangerously from encouraging the development of the kind of manager that society urgently needs?