American M.B.As. Flock to Asia

By Cris Prystay

When William Lee, a manager at Microsoft Corp., decided to seek to leapfrog his career by getting an M.B.A., he signed up for a joint-venture executive program in Singapore run by the Anderson School of Business of the University of California, Los Angeles, and the National University of Singapore. Mr. Lee, 37 years old, lives in Reno, Nevada, and his job is entirely based in the U.S. By the time he graduates in August, he will have flown to Asia four times over 15 months to earn a degree he easily could have done at home.

The commute is worth it, he said. This way he can ramp up his Asia experience to help fast-forward his career.

"That's where the economic growth is. If you want to be a business leader in the next 10 to 15 years, understanding the Asian business environment is important," Mr. Lee said. "When I was weighing which school to go to, credibility came to mind. The perception that I have a better understanding of the environment is easier to sell when I can say I've gone over there to study and observe the business environment and meet Asian business leaders."

U.S. and European business schools that have expanded to Asia in the past few years to tap growing demand for management education there are starting to see new demand from an unexpected clientele: students from back home.

A number of high-profile business schools, including the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management and French business school Insead, have set up campuses or joint-venture executive M.B.A. programs with local universities in Asia to tap demand from both local students and global expatriates working in the region. As Asia's booming economies, led by India and China, gain more global muscle, business students world-wide have become eager to get Asia on their résumés. These schools have seen a pickup in enrollment from students who commute from places as far away as London and Los Angeles.

"These students want the Asia exposure, even if they aren't working there now. They view the trend in business as requiring a significant understanding of Asia," said Judy Olian, dean of the Anderson School of Business. In the class that just began in May in UCLA's program based in Singapore, 48% of the students are U.S. residents, up from 29% in May 2004.

The growing number of Asia-bound M.B.A. commuters, meanwhile, lends fresh credence to business schools' decision to head to Asia themselves. For nearly a decade, U.S. and European business schools have wrestled with how best to address Asia's boom. While some have plowed ahead in Asia, others have held back, concerned that offering a satellite degree would hurt the brand power of the degree offered at their U.S. campus.

"As important as Asia and other international markets are in the global economy, we don't believe we could expand the faculty to fulfill the needs of a full-fledged 'branch campus' abroad without diluting the nature of the kind of education we offer," said Krishna Pelapu, senior associate dean for international development at Harvard Business School. Harvard has more than 200 full-time professors who are occupied at home with full course loads; it would be difficult to get faculty of the same stature and quality to teach abroad, he said.

Other business schools believe they can strengthen their brand by offering a degree overseas. Kellogg, for example, has run an executive M.B.A. in Hong Kong through a partnership with Hong Kong University of Science and Technology's School of Business and Management for 10 years, and it also offers joint-venture M.B.A.s in Israel, Canada and Germany.

Kellogg's brand is based in part on the quality of the student the school admits and the quality of instruction, said Dipak Jain, Kellogg's dean. Students admitted in places like Hong Kong must have the same qualifications as the students who take the program at the school's campus near Chicago, he said.

For staffing reasons, Kellogg offers only its part-time executive M.B.A. overseas. Its professors fly to Hong Kong on weekends and teach half the courses, and business-school professors from HKUST teach the other half. "We only partner with schools we know have quality people who can deliver the quality experience," Mr. Jain said.

"We think the quality of our program and our brand has gone up, overall, because we have programs in Europe, in Asia and a new one in Miami," he said. "In the Hong Kong program, for example, we have electives on doing business in China; students in our German program or in Chicago or Tel Aviv can go to Hong Kong and take these electives. Or they can fly to Hong Kong and take the whole M.B.A. program."

Dutch citizen Michael Hamelink, 39, commuted from Johannesburg, South Africa, to Singapore to do his executive M.B.A. at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business program five years ago. "At that time, I had just moved from Hong Kong back to Johannesburg, and I was impressed by the huge impact Asia had on the world economy and especially China on the business world. This made me choose to commute to Singapore to sense and gather most of Asia's business insights," said Mr. Hamelink, who now is chief financial officer of KLM City Hopper, KLM's regional airline for Europe. He said he would like to return to Asia to work in the next few years, and that the contacts he made in the program would prove helpful.

Kellogg and Chicago charge the same prices for the executive M.B.A. programs they run in the U.S. as those they run elsewhere. UCLA and National University of Singapore charge slightly less for the Singapore-based degree compared with UCLA's own Los Angeles-based executive M.B.A.: Fees for the degree in Los Angeles cost $100,000, and fees for the Asia-based program are $69,800.

But there also is the cost for travel. The Singapore-based program, set up in 2004, is broken into six intensive two-week blocks that are split between countries: two sessions in Singapore, one in China, one in India and two in Los Angeles. Students pay for their own flights and hotels for the 12 weeks the course is in session.

Assuming a student pays $250 a night for a hotel, he would save about $15,000 on the Asia-based program. Students get two degrees, one from UCLA and one from the National University of Singapore.

"We have quite a few Americans based in the U.S., but who have Asia responsibilities and/or interests, such as supply chains out of Asia, or working for an Asian company, or marketing to Asia," said Jochen Wirtz, a business-school professor who is co-director of the UCLA-NUS program. The program's structure of two-week sessions "allows participants to fly in from anywhere. We are probably the only program in the world where some 50% travel from another continent -- not just country -- to attend our sessions."

Mr. Lee, the Microsoft manager, said cost savings weren't a factor in his decision to go the Asian route. He had first considered doing a full-time M.B.A. at an Ivy League school, but the Singapore-based program struck a chord.

He has loved the pan-Asian exposure, including meetings with senior business executives that the school set up. Students also work on a real piece of consulting business as part of a final project. Mr. Lee prepared an Asian market-entry strategy for a hedge fund based in the U.S.

"I had never been to Asia before the program, but I know you have to understand Asia if you want to take on a senior business role," he said. "That's where the growth will be. The U.S. economy simply isn't growing like the Asian economies."

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