For business school students, Silicon Valley is new Wall Street

Wall Street once stood as the pinnacle of achievement for business school students across the country, but over the last several years a new destination has emerged: Silicon Valley.

The tech world’s riches have become such a lure for the strivers who have historically sought the credential that programs are now struggling to convince them that an MBA will help them achieve their dreams.

Jostling to stay relevant and attract students, business schools are crafting programs, classes and disciplines to teach what many say cannot be taught: entrepreneurship, tech industry know-how, the fail-fast mentality of startups.

“People want to work in an industry that is not just about making a difference, but is transforming the world in significant and important ways, and technology has become that industry,” said Scott DeRue, the dean of the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan. “It used to be that finance was not just how you could make money, but it was how you could become the currency of how the world works. Today, technology is that currency.”

Starting in the fall of 2017, UC Berkeley will offer its first class in a program called MET (Management, Entrepreneurship and Technology) that combines classes from the College of Engineering and the Haas School of Business in an effort to prepare undergraduate students to create their own startup or join a big Bay Area tech firm like Google, Facebook or Salesforce, to which Berkeley is among the top feeders.

Because of its proximity to Silicon Valley juggernauts, UC Berkeley has been tailoring its student offerings around the tech sector for nearly a decade. About 40 percent of graduates go on to work in the tech sector.

But the MET program is the first of its kind at the university.

Business colleges and universities that have been historic feeders to the financial industry have begun to see the number of students entering the tech sector surpass that of students heading to Wall Street firms.

The University of Michigan’s business school has developed its own entrepreneurship center. Every year, half a dozen startups go through its accelerator program designed to jump-start new businesses. The program is open to nonstudents, and their participation helps broaden the students’ networks and experience, said DeRue.

“The challenge is everything is changing so fast,” he said. “We have to equip (students) to know how to work in this new world and to not only understand technology, but understand the intersections of skills and industry that will help you be successful. And a lot of that — a lot more than it used to be — is by letting them actually do it. It’s experience-driven.”

The traditional business school trajectory for students pursuing careers in finance was a more linear track, with internships and a job at a big financial firm, DeRue said. Tech know-how was hardly a requirement.

In tech, it’s far harder to envision the future of work. That poses a unique challenge for business schools attempting to convince prospective students that their programs will best prepare them for the real world.

The very size of the tech industry may be contributing to the rapid growth of interest among students, said Rich Wong, the employer relationship manager for the tech industry at UC Berkeley’s MBA program.

“The tech sector is so much broader now than it used to be — it’s not just hardware, software and telecom, now you’ve got fintech, health tech, apps, gig-economy jobs, startups,” he said. “It’s not a singular industry, because any business that is successful and growing will need to be involved with tech tools or online commerce.”

Student interest began to shift toward tech around the time of the recession, university officials said.

The financial dealings that led to the stock market and housing crash of 2008 left would-be Wall Street workers looking for other careers. Meanwhile, tech companies like Facebook and Google were growing in size and value.

Saar Gur, a general partner at venture-capital firm CRV and a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, got his MBA in the early 2000s. At that time, he said, there was a similar wave of business students who had stepped off the traditional path toward Wall Street to “seek gold at startups.” But after the bubble burst, he said, most returned to traditional finance jobs.

That’s less likely to happen this time around, experts said.

“There’s a lot of people who are drawn to the perceived wealth creation that’s happening out here and the speed at which it’s happening, but I think a lot of that has gone away, and what we’re left with is people who want to work on something they’re excited about or that matters or will have an impact on this new world,” Gur said. “It’s bigger than just banks are bad and tech is cool. It has to do with purpose.”

Marissa Lang is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: mlang@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Marissa_Jae