Sailing Away For an MBA

By Jodie Morse, Daren Fonda and Desa Philadelphia

David Schoch, 30, a telecom executive, is taking some time away from work to get his M.B.A., and he spends his days in such seminars as Economics of the Firm and Management: People, Principles and Processes. In the evenings, he works on group projects at the apartment he shares with two other guys. In many ways, his existence is like that of any first-year student at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business. Yet when Schoch walks to class each morning it is not along the blustery shores of Lake Michigan but through the bustling streets of Barcelona, past Antonio Gaudi's Casa Batllo, to a century-old art-nouveau office building that bears the University of Chicago's red-and-white logo above its filigreed iron balconies.

Schoch is one of a new generation of global executives commuting to class with passport in hand. An American whose primary residence is Prague, he manages some 300 employees across the Czech and Slovak republics for GTS, a firm based in London with offices in the U.S., and operates the largest fiber-optic network in Europe. But for 13 one-week stays over two years, Schoch is jetting into Barcelona to join 80 classmates of 24 nationalities.

In addition to learning such traditional M.B.A. subjects as accounting and finance, the students participate in a special summer session devoted to global commerce. For three weeks, Schoch will travel from Barcelona to the University of Chicago's flagship Illinois campus and then to a second satellite campus that the university opened last fall in Singapore. "I've spent most of my career overseas working with people from different countries," says Schoch. "It just didn't make sense to drop everything to get my M.B.A. back in the U.S."

As more and more businesses have shrugged off borders, so too have the institutions that train corporate executives. In a survey of 55 deans of top business schools conducted by Rice University this spring, globalization tied with technology and entrepreneurship as the No. 1 priorities for improvement. Aspiring global execs are also getting trained in other ways, whether through online M.B.A. programs now attracting students across 24 time zones, or at the summer seminars popular among Americans at the highly regarded Institut Europeen d'Administration des Affaires (INSEAD) business school in Fontainebleau, France. INSEAD is collaborating with the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania to exchange faculty and students among campuses in Fontainebleau, Philadelphia, San Francisco and Singapore. Already 39 Americans are earning M.B.A.s through INSEAD in France and Singapore.

These borderless B schools underscore a broader educational trend. Universities are now the fifth largest U.S. exporter of services abroad--topping entertainment and health care--and raked in $10 billion last year. In the past two years, Duke University's Fuqua School of Business in Durham, N.C., has opened an outpost in Frankfurt, Germany, while Harvard has established research facilities in Hong Kong and Buenos Aires. And in April, Cornell announced that it would open a branch of its medical school in Qatar.

While the number of American-born M.B.A. students has fallen in recent years (mainly because the then hot U.S. economy lured students away from graduate school), foreign students have been flocking to U.S. business schools. From 1992 to 1999, the number of master's degrees in business awarded to international students jumped 82%, to 15,618, according to the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. There has also been a surge in foreign nationals earning master of laws degrees in U.S. law schools: their numbers rose 62%, to 2,800, from 1996 to 2000. Why? U.S. law is becoming the standard for more and more international commerce.

Foreign business students in the U.S. can join the growing number of their American classmates studying international business, a degree that grew more than 150% in popularity over the past decade. "It's just as important as accounting and finance," says Linda Gerber, a senior lecturer at the University of Texas at Austin's McCombs School of Business. In April, the school's faculty voted to require each of its students to spend two weeks studying overseas. "If they don't understand more about the global environment," says Gerber, "students aren't going to be competitive."

Nor are they likely to catch the eye of corporate recruiters like Ana Trbojevich, who works for Baxter Healthcare Corp., in Deerfield, Ill. When Baxter, which manufactures products to treat life-threatening diseases, expanded its operations in China and Latin America, Trbojevich trawled the top business schools for students who understood those cultures. "In South America, you can't go and do business without first trying to build a relationship," says Trbojevich. "For example, you need to talk first about the family. That is a very important part of doing business." So is understanding the idiosyncrasies of corporate finance, labor law and marketing in foreign markets. "Even between Texas and Switzerland and Germany and New York, the culture of business changes slightly," says John Thompson, an Enron vice president based in London who recruits all over Europe for the Houston energy company. "People who understand those fine differences just have enormous value."