When I was a boy there were a couple of truths we were taught we could rely on. One was that New York City water was the best in the world. No one would have thought of buying bottled water unless perhaps it was carbonated, in which case it wasn’t water exactly; it was seltzer. The second was that the New York City public schools were as good as it gets, and they were. The neighborhood schools that didn’t have names but had numbers (I myself was privileged to go to P.S. 254) and the local high school, and the examination high schools like Stuyvesant, Music and Art, and Bronx High School of Science — which we all knew with certainty were the crucibles of genius.

Comment on the water I will leave to others. But I believe the schools were as good as they were because the teachers were extraordinary. Back in those days, women of ambition and capacity had four choices: they could become religious; they could become nurses or librarians; or they could become schoolteachers. I will defer to the feminists on the remarkable transformation that the liberation of women has had in the last 30 years, but I fear that once the door opened to medicine, law, university professorships, and business, women who otherwise would have become schoolteachers didn’t pursue that path.

And, of course, schools in my day were the beneficiaries of the Great Depression. In grade school I had teachers who were lawyers, teachers with Ph.D.‘s, people who were unable to find work in their chosen fields who took the option they had to become civil servants and have the reassurance of a government check on a regular basis.

The economic drama that is being played out all around us these days is depressing and gloomy; beyond that, it is frightening. I find myself searching for a silver lining even as I am reassured by economists and pundits that “this can’t go on forever and history teaches us that what goes down must go up.” Some years ago, during one of the periodic budget crisis that are part of the life of a university president, when I was trying to find a way to economize, my oldest son — then at business school earning an MBA — gave me some advice one evening. He said, “Whatever you do, don’t cut the placement office.” Austerity may be applied to all aspects of the university except for the placement office. He told me that his classmates at business school almost uniformly had matriculated for one reason: to get a job. If during the course of their two years they achieved some competencies, learned some moves, and developed some skills, that was all very well, but if it didn’t result in a job at the end of the process they would be disillusioned and embittered. And they would make you pay.

I witnessed this myself, once, most dramatically, when through a technical oversight — the inadvertent reporting of inaccurate data to U.S. News and World Report, our law school’s ratings plummeted. We explained the error to the students, to no avail. We pointed out that no law school could drop 20 places in the rankings in one year unless it was consumed by fire. We were talking to ourselves. All the students knew was they were graduating from a school that a magazine had deemed inferior to what it had been when they enrolled and that would result in a more challenging environment for them when they went into the marketplace. And they made me pay.

What are the business-school placement officers going to do now that the firms that hired so many of their fresh alumni are no longer there to embrace them? The newly minted MBA looking forward to big bucks with Lehman Brothers has got to be scratching her head and wondering at life’s cruel sense of humor. What can or should universities, who Lord knows have their own problems these days (witness announcements by the presidents of Boston University and Emory University that they are putting building plans and new hires on hold until things sort themselves out), do for their students? Many have been reaching out to their older graduates, people in their 30s and 40s, who suddenly find themselves unemployed, offering the service of, yes, as my son pointed out, the all-important placement office.

But what about those who were just minted? Might it make sense to see an opportunity here to redirect them to alternative careers altogether? Our elementary and secondary schools are still in need of teachers. If a few junior “masters of the universe” were to go into teaching, would that be so bad? There is an opportunity here for Teach for America and our universities to join forces. Our schools of education need to provide incentive plans: loans, grants, and scholarships induce people to think about teaching. Likewise, our schools of public administration and public policy to assist young people in considering careers in public service on the federal, state, and local levels. And also with NGOs and various non-profit alternatives, domestic and international: let’s double the size of the Peace Corps.

We’ve got a presidential debate coming up. Wouldn’t it be nice if the candidates were to talk about issues like this, or variations that no doubt could be crafted by my betters, instead of giving us rehearsed little speeches unresponsive to the questions put to them by the moderator?

I have read that the students at our best colleges and universities are confident that there is a positive future ahead even for those interested in finance. Perhaps they are right. But meanwhile, while the world sorts itself out, let’s get school superintendents, governors, and mayors thinking about how to make lemonade out of lemons. Let’s engage Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee in this conversation.