[转自P&Q] The Appeal Of Getting Your MBA In The Far East

Zeros

Born in Lincoln, Nebraska, Justin Chang lived in Alabama and California before attending high school in New Jersey and earning an economics degree at New York University. But when he decided to get an MBA, he never even considered a U.S. school.

“I think every generation has a gold rush, and now it’s China,” says Chang, 29, who worked at a hedge fund and an IT consulting firm after finishing his undergraduate work. “I wanted to be in Beijing, so I only looked at Peking University and the BiMBA program.”

Like Chang, a growing number of Westerners are recognizing that as China’s economy has risen, so has the appeal of its MBA programs. The 2012 Financial Times global list of the 100 best full-time MBA programs includes five Chinese business schools: CEIBS, Hong Kong UST Business School, CUHK Business School, University of Hong Kong, and Peking University Guanghua. In each case, classes are taught in English by professors proficient in the language in a 14-to-24-month MBA experience.

GETTING YOUR MBA IN ASIA CAN COST HALF AS MUCH AS IT WOULD IN THE U.S.

Earning a degree in China typically costs less than half of what it does at U.S. schools: Consider BiMBA’s tuition bill of about $30,000, next to Wharton’s $108,000. And many of these schools are anxious for top North American or European applicants and willing to dangle significant scholarship money in front of them.

Along with the typical MBA knowhow imparted in a good program, these students can acquire a network of Chinese nationals and perhaps even score an executive job in the Middle Kingdom after graduation. A winter 2012 survey from the London-based management and recruitment firm Antal found that, whereas only 49% of U.S. companies plan to hire in the next quarter, 71% of Chinese ones do. That difference is keenly felt by graduating MBAs in Asia. Last year at CEIBS alone, 450 companies posted more than 1,500 job openings for the school’s 184 graduates who each had seven to eight job opportunities on average.

Nonetheless, even the highest-rated Chinese B-schools lack the cachet of top-drawer U.S. names. “When I see Harvard or Wharton or Northwestern on a resume, it makes me sit up and take notice,” says Tara McKernan, a New York City-based executive vice president at the executive search firm DHR International. “And of course, Cambridge or Oxford or London School of Economics would, too. An MBA from BiMBA or CEIBS doesn’t have a lot of impact in the U.S. yet because it’s something of an unknown here.” A few other drawbacks to the Chinese MBA experience exist (we’ll get to those later), but Chang and the other Americans at CEIBS and BiMBA express unreserved confidence in their decisions to study in the Far East.

THE BIGGEST ADVANTAGE: CULTIVATING RELATIONSHIPS WITH CHINESE BUSINESS CONTACTS

First and foremost, these transplants get the opportunity to cultivate long-term relationships with Chinese nationals who can serve as business contacts for the rest of their corporate or entrepreneurial lives. “I wanted to do an MBA in Asia to enhance my international perspective and contacts,” says Brian McMahon, 29, a Seattle native who graduated from the University of Southern California and worked in investment banking before starting his MBA at CEIBS. “There are [Western] students here who want a Chinese network but not necessarily to work in China.”

Garrett Twitchell, 30, a U.S. native who enrolled at BiMBA after graduating from Annapolis and working as a NATO policy adviser in Kabul, plans to stay in China. “One of the interesting things about doing an MBA in China is you get direct access to a demographic of Chinese people you wouldn’t otherwise,” he says. “The entire full-time class is about 50 people, so it’s quite intimate.” While relatively inexpensive for U.S. students, the tuition at Chinese business schools is a hefty sum for many natives, so the Chinese students tend to come from affluent families.

Working on projects with native Chinese equals a crash course in culture, Twitchell says. “You learn quickly as a foreigner how to phrase things because ‘face’ is so important over here. You have to know how to skirt around certain issues. Because of this, I’ve developed my leadership skills in a cross-cultural environment.”

LEARNING TO STUDY AND WORK WITH NATIVE CHINESE

About 70% of Twitchell’s BiMBA classmates are native Chinese as are about 60% of McMahon’s at CEIBS. But the percentage of locals can vary significantly. “More than 90% of our students come from outside of Hong Kong and quite a lot of them have never been to Asia before,” says Chris Tsang, executive director of MBA/MSc Programs at HKUST Business School. “We typically have students from 28 different nationalities in any one class so they are  able to work in a very global and culturally diverse environment.”

HKUST took in 92 international students in its entering class last year, including 21 from North America, 20 from European, and two from Latin America. CEIBS, meantime, drew 78 international students in 2011, including 16 from North America and 17 from Europe. So the rising prestige of some of these schools is beginning to attract a critical mass of students from outside China.

Professors also tend to come from other countries, another plus because it gives the schools a larger talent pool from which to draw. “We have a lot of choice of faculty because most people are hired as adjunct visiting professors,” says Bruce Stening, international dean at BiMBA. “They come in and teach their class in four weeks and then go, so we can search around for someone else if they’re not good.”

So how do Western students gain an understanding of the Chinese financial system, consumer behavior, and business style if their professors come from outside China? “In all of the courses we’re trying to make the content relevant to the Chinese economy,” Stening says. “If a professor teaches marketing, it has to have a context that’s relevant to China. And of course, there are courses given by local professors who take people on field trips to old battle sites in China.”

LOCAL SCHOOLS ARE CREATING AN INVENTORY OF CASE STUDIES ON CHINA-BASED BUSINESSES

Dave Wilson, president and CEO of the Graduate Management Admission Council, the organization that administers the GMAT, notes, “B-schools are also building up case studies about scenarios at China-based businesses instead of importing cases from elsewhere in the world.”

These schools also are receiving help winning over professors who can offer the best of both worlds: “The government is working very hard on getting faculty who are Chinese natives educated overseas to come back to China,” says Wilson. In the past ten years, for example, Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business in Beijing has hired over two dozen full-time professors who have earned PhDs at elite U.S. universities and previously taught at Wharton, Stanford, University of California (Berkeley), INSEAD, Cornell and Yale.

Another advantage for students: the relatively low cost of living in China. The database Numbeo.com reports that U.S. consumer prices, including rent, are about 61% higher than China’s. Chicago rents are 50% higher than those in Shanghai; New York City’s are 231% more than Beijing’s.

COST OF LIVING IS MUCH CHEAPER IN CHINA THAN IT IS IN MAJOR U.S. CITIES

Allen Fang, 28, a CEIBS student originally from Saratoga, California, rents a two-bedroom apartment within walking distance of the campus in Shanghai for $1,200 a month. McMahon pays $700 a month for his share of a five-bedroom with four roommates. Both said housing was easy to find. McMahon used the website smartshanghai.com and Fang went through a local real estate agent.

At BiMBA, Garrett Twitchell pays $425 a month for an apartment he estimates would easily go for $1,500 to $2,000 in Manhattan. His Beijing neighborhood, about a 20-minute commute from campus by subway,  is not so upscale and he’s the only non-native who lives here, but he wouldn’t have it any other way. “My day-to-day Chinese survival skills are good,” he explains. “I can order food and ask directions and converse with my neighbors in Mandarin.”

Even those who arrive with minimal Chinese language skills will likely find the Shanghai transportation easy to navigate. “The subway has signs in English and when you buy a ticket there’s a button you can press for English,” McMahon says. “An average cab ride is around $5. You can pretty much get to anywhere within Shanghai’s commercial center for less than $10.”

TRANSPORTATION IN CHINA IS ALSO EFFICIENT AND INEXPENSIVE

In fact, most of the students gave positive – even glowing — reviews of Chinese transportation systems overall. “I was blown away by sophistication in Shanghai,” says Matthew Beardall, 37, a JP Morgan Chase market president who spent two weeks studying in China as part of the OneMBA at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “It had wide, straight highways and city streets with multiple levels so there’s room for deliveries and speedy driving. I’d just been in India and the difference was remarkable.”

The local cuisine also gets high marks from U.S.  students. “Shanghai has the most international selection of food in China,” says Fang, who has a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Pennsylvania. “There’s Korean, French, American, or anything else you would want.”

While Americans will have no trouble finding high-quality food at prices lower than those found in the U.S., they should by no means expect developing-world prices for nice bistro meals. Sure, street vendors sell greasy meat kabobs or fried noodles for less than $1, but Western palates generally only tolerate so much of that fare. “The cost of food was a surprise to me,” Twitchell says. “I didn’t budget properly. It’s not this romanticized version of [living in China] – eating noodles and rice all the time isn’t that great. You get cravings for Western food. You can go to T.G.I. Friday’s and Sizzler here, and you’ll pay more for it than you do in the U.S.”

As such in any world city with a plethora of construction sites and new hotels, shopping malls, and housing complexes, the cost of food and housing can only be expected to rise.

BUT DON’T EXPECT CHINESE URBAN AREAS TO BE GARDEN SPOTS

And certainly, the presence of shiny new buildings doesn’t mean Chinese urban areas are any garden spots. “I think Beijing is one of the toughest cities survival-wise,” Chang says. “You might have to fight for a taxi for 40 minutes. Traffic is rough, pollution is bad, and it’s always either too hot or too cold. But it helps you grow as a person.”

Perhaps the most bankable way for U.S. MBA students to grow as job candidates, however, is to resist the temptation to speak English in their spare time: Graduates who can’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese fluently will almost certainly find themselves shut out of lucrative corporate jobs in China.

Even Americans with a proven knack for picking up such romance languages as Italian and French shouldn’t kid themselves about the prospect of learning a tone language like Mandarin or Cantonese. “I can speak Mandarin at networking events, and I have many friends who don’t speak English,” McMahon says. “But I started learning Chinese before I came here.” Anyone who wants an MBA-worthy job in China would be wise to do the same.