"I'm about two weeks off my syllabus," said Jon Scott a finance professor at Temple University's Fox School of Business. "This is historic."

Before each class, Scott calls up a financial news website on his computer and discusses the day's main headlines with his students.

Though many business majors are worried about their job prospects, Scott has some reassuring words for them.

"The entire banking system is not in trouble," Scott said. "There are two banking systems: One consists of 6,500 small banks that are doing quite well. Then there are about 600 large banks, and about two dozen of those are experiencing significant problems."

Scott, who has taught at Temple for 17 years, acknowledges that jobs in investment banking may be harder to find in the short term. But in the realm of wealth management, there will still be plenty of opportunities, he said.

"Students may need to be a little more creative about what they want to do and expand their horizons with their prospective job searches," Scott said. "This is not the end of the world.

"There were a lot of excesses that have taken place in the last five to 10 years. It's a very bad hangover. And all hangovers go away."

Dana Fisco, a junior finance major at Temple, said the crisis has caused many of her classmates to consider postponing their forays into the job market for a few years.

"Now more than ever, a lot of students are looking at graduate schools because of the situation," said Fisco. "This year, J.P. Morgan cancelled several interviews with seniors for full-time jobs because they were no longer recruiting from Temple."

"We're going to be feeling this for a very long time. I think it's going to trickle down to me and my year as well. At the same time it's going to be cheaper to hire us. Hopefully, the prospective employers will see that."

Vaishnavi Kannan, 22, an international transfer student studying actuarial science at Fox, said "someone needs to take immediate action or the entire world is going to suffer. If I was an investment banker, I'd be pretty scared right now. I definitely think there is going to be a recession."

Across town on the campus of the University of Pennsylvania, Hakjae Le, 34, a Wharton student specializing in strategic management, was unfazed by the recent stock market dives but was concerned about the longterm outlook.

"We are all here to get a job, and the job market is crazy. Even people who have jobs worry about the situation," Le said. "It's a matter of where the economy is headed. In the end we are all affected by this."