Your campus could be a Marriott lounge or a window seat on a flight to Bangkok. Your fellow students may hail from Tasmania or Milan. You will meet for two-week "residencies" in São Paulo, Frankfurt and Beijing. You will rappel down the Great Wall of China in a "team-building" exercise. You will spend all of five weeks on an actual campus; mostly you will take classes and complete team projects over the Internet. After 19 months, you will have a Global Executive M.B.A. degree, courtesy of Duke University's Fuqua School of Business. Cost: $95,000. Plus airfare.

Pricey as it is, Duke's program is one of the hottest tickets for globe-trotting executives pursuing an M.B.A. Enrollment, at 88, has more than doubled since 1998. And partly at the behest of Deutsche Bank, Duke has launched a similar program, but with much less travel, at a new campus in Frankfurt. Duke projects that within a few years it will enroll more students in its Global M.B.A. programs than the 678 who now earn the traditional degree at its campus in Durham, N.C.

Global M.B.A. students—a third of them foreign nationals, and all at least partly sponsored by their companies—rave about the program. "I travel 40% of the time for my work," says Catherine Celestin, 41, a Pfizer manager based in New York City, who enrolled in 1999. "I can still keep up and take classes. The way the program is structured, I get plenty of foreign exposure."

It works like this: students and professors meet for three two-week sessions, visiting pairs of industrial and developing economies, such as Germany and the Czech Republic or China and Hong Kong. Students stay in hotels, tour factories, get face time with ceos and attend lectures on topics like global finance. Back at their jobs, they are assigned to teams with members stationed around the world, in part to simulate the pressures of operating across time zones. Teams use instant messaging and online forums to work on case studies. They develop a PowerPoint presentation—say, assessing Brazil's economic prospects—and post their results online. Professors distribute cd-roms of lectures and leave assignments on a school website. Says Celestin: "You learn to resolve conflicts without being in a physical room together. It's like the real world."

Student Claudio Muruzabal, who works for NCR in Buenos Aires, says watching the manager of a PC factory in China deal with limited supplies let him "see firsthand the effects of restrictions on trade." His German colleague, Thomas Nitzsche, recalled a more touristy memory: rappelling down the Great Wall. "It was," he says, "absolute fun."

Send a letter to the editor

M O R E  O N  T I M E   A S I A

M O R E  O N  T I M E   E U R O P E



M O R E  O N  T I M E. C O M