"One of the most-difficult tasks for today’s wealthy is managing their investments. The newly wealthy may have been great at launching dot-com firms, running a health-care company or owning real estate, but they’re discovering that managing investments requires vastly different skills. People who spent their lives running companies and selling them suddenly have to learn how to manage My Portfolio Inc.

“The nature of our wealth has changed,” says Sandra Fox, a student at a Wharton wealth-education course, whose husband operated a real-estate brokerage business. “Suddenly we had liquid assets. Although we knew how to manage a real-estate business, I did not have the background to know what to do with liquid assets.”

Gone are the days when managing the family fortune simply meant buying blue-chip stocks and some muni bonds. Today’s investment world has become vastly more complex, with hedge funds, private-equity, commodities and new debt markets. Add to that the myriad rules governing taxes, philanthropy, trust and estate law, and the job of managing private wealth requires its own education.

Another reason they’re headed back to school: Today’s wealthy don’t trust their private bankers or advisors. Bankers, they say, are often more interested in selling them the latest financial products rather than offering sound financial advice. And the wealthy are tired of being outsmarted by the people they pay to manage their money."

- Taken from the Wall Street Journal's Wealth Report.  Read more at the WSJ website.