That, in essence, is the takeaway from a new survey released by QS TopMBA.com, a career and education network based in the UK. The report, Salary & Recruitment Trends, was compiled based on the responses of 743 recruiters from across the globe. The report’s authors write that the news could have been much worse for grads, but the post-crisis results are still sobering.

Interestingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the authors contend that the impact of the crisis was felt most strongly in the U.S. Global demand for MBA talent, it says, is growing stronger outside of the West. “What is clear is that MBA demand is no longer concentrated on North America, which in fact is showing declines in MBA hiring,” it reads. “But is moving towards emerging markets in Asia, Middle East and Central Europe where high GDP growth rates are fueling an MBA hiring boom.”

However, that growth in opportunities comes at a price. In the U.S. and Western Europe, QS reports the average starting salary is $91,500. That stands in stark contrast to the $53,300 in Latin America, $55,000 in Asia and $49,560 in Eastern Europe. The good news here is that around the worldwide, paychecks appear to be stable despite the crisis. The bad news is that they’ve stagnated after years of strong growth.

For those employers who are hiring, the data show that they’re playing it safe by looking for experienced recruits. The number of employers looking for MBAs with 5-8 years of experience increased by 22 percentage points this year, to 34% of respondents. The number of employers with demand for MBAs with only 1-3 years of experienced halved, landing at 17%. And the demand for MBAs with less than one year of experience fell to just 2% of employers, down from 10% the year before. This could spell trouble for the programs that seek out younger students, as fresh-faced grads face an increasingly hostile job market.

-Anne VanderMey

One newcomer to the scene is the veterans’ club at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. The group, formed a few months ago, will host its first formal speaking event on Monday. The Haas newsroom has the event details.

For the group at Haas, which has roughly 40 U.S. military veterans as students, the Veterans Day celebration was a quiet one. Last night, members marked the occasion by dressing down in blue collared shirts, and meeting with Haas staff and students at a nearby hotel restaurant to swap stories about their experiences. The idea, says James Bender, who used to land large planes on aircraft carriers and is a member of the Haas MBA class of 2010, was to communicate that veterans are the same as everyone else. Even if, despite the heavy course load, the stress levels of the B-school aren’t quite comparable. Says the Humanitarian Service Medalist: “I know that at the end of the day, [at Haas] I’m never going to crash my plane.”

Readers, what’s your campus doing to mark Veterans Day? Tell us in the comment section.

- Anne VanderMey

However, according to an only half-joking report released last week, the low numbers of Harvard MBAs landing Wall Street jobs could point to something else – an impending recovery.

It is the first time that figure has been flat since the organization first started doing the survey in 2004, says Nathan Bell, the author of the report and the council’s director of research and policy analysis. The zero percent change from 2008 to 2009 follows four consecutive years of growth. There were 257 graduate institutions that responded to the survey.

"Growth was slowing in the last few years with international students, but it was still growth,” Bell says. "This marks a big change. It is a shift and it is something that we need to watch."

The report comes at a time when some international students are questioning whether it is still a worthwhile investment to come study in the U.S., as opposed to their home country. The dismal global economy, challenges securing H-1B visas in the U.S. and difficulty obtaining student loans seems to have had a sobering effect on many applicants, Bell says.

Indian students, in particular, seem to be the most disenchanted with U.S. graduate schools; enrollment from first-time students from India was down 16%, the largest decline ever reported by CGS. On the flip side, first-time enrollment from China was up 16%. Both India and China are the two countries that send the most graduate school students to the U.S., so the net effect ended up being “a washout,” says Bell.

Trailing not far behind India was South Korea, where enrollment sank 13%. The largest spike in enrollment in the report came from the Middle East, where there was 22% growth, according to the report.

Back in August, a CGS report showed the U.S. graduate schools' admissions offers to prospective international students from Indian and South Korea fell in 2009, with declines of 12% and 9% respectively. Of the Indian and South Korean students who received admissions offers, fewer than expected decided to matriculate this fall.

"It was a little surprising how steep those declines were," Bell says. "To be honest, I didn't think they be quite as bad as they were."

The ripple effect of the stagnant enrollment figures is already being felt in some of the large academic departments that typically draw the most international students. There was either a decline or no growth at all in five of eight broad fields of study, the report says. First-time enrollment fell by 4% in physical and earth sciences, while remaining flat in business and engineering, the three largest fields of study for students, according to the study.

In the coming year, it will be interesting to see if international enrollment figures continue to remain flat, or, in the worst case scenario, decline. Many graduate schools, including business schools, have put into place new programs this year that help students obtain a no cosigner loan, which may help ease some international students’ anxiety about financing their education.

Readers, do you think international students will continue to be wary of coming to study in the U.S. in the coming year? Do you expect the decline in enrollment from countries like India and South Korea to persist?

Those selected as fellows will receive an annual stipend, which includes a $50,000 MBA tuition payment to help them pay off their student loans. Carlyle, a global private equity firm, is committing $1 million to the effort over the four years. David Rubenstein, the managing director and co-founder of the The Carlyle Group, said he views the fellowship as a “significant and meaningful step” for the sector.

"…We believe more must be done to accelerate how we attract and retain minority talent within the industry," Rubenstein said.

The Robert Toigo Foundation is known in the MBA community for its prestigious fellowships awarded to minorities who want to attend business school; over the last 20 years more than 800 students have received fellowships, according to Toigo. Many of the foundation’s alumni have wanted to pursue careers in the private equity world, but have not always found it easy to break in, said Nancy Sims, president of the Robert Toigo Foundation.

"The growing number of Toigo Fellows and Alumni focused on private equity balanced with the perceived barriers to entry sparked Toigo’s efforts to address the disparity," Sims said.

The new Toigo Private Equity Fellowship will hopefully serve as a "catalyst within the private equity sector" by attracting top minority graduates, Sims said.

Students interested in applying to the fellowship can apply at the Toigo Foundation’s Web site. The deadline for submitting an application is December 11, 2009. Both Toigo and the Carlyle Group said they expect interest “to be strong” in the program.

The reason you don’t see them is that many schools that don’t make it into the ranking don’t report complete information to BusinessWeek for their online profiles. However, we do have some additional numbers for the unranked schools that are illuminating. Unfortunately, not every program in this category submitted employment data and others submitted numbers that raised some red flags with us, so take these averages with a grain of salt.

For 42 of the unranked schools that submitted sufficient data, the average rate of students not reporting job offers (usually the reporting cutoff is in the fall) was 22%. Last year, the overall average was 12%. Some schools fared better than others, but among the hardest hit were Texas Christian University’s Neeley School of Business, the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business , the Howard University program, and American University’s Kogod School of Business --all reporting more than 40% of students never getting an offer.

For context, the number of graduates of top 30 MBA programs not reporting a job offer three months after graduation was 16.5% in 2009, up from 5% last year.

What these data seem to show is that the rate of job offers declined about 10 percentage points across the board this year in the U.S. That may not be surprising for unranked schools, but it's not what you might expect given the reverence some top schools command.

A possible explanation is that, contrary to popular belief, cachet won’t save you in times of trouble. Alternatively, it could mean that lower-tier schools caught employers’ eyes by accepting lower salaries. The 2009 starting pay for the unranked schools we looked at was about $78,000, with about 40% of those who accepted jobs getting signing bonuses. For the top-tier schools in 2009, starting pay was close to $96,500, with roughly 65% reporting signing bonuses.

Internationally, however, the picture was markedly sunnier. Though many of the 25 schools considered for BusinessWeek’s non-U.S. ranking did not report their employment data, and others reported implausible data, in terms of final job offers reported, most programs seemed to hover around the range of 90% of students getting at least one in 2009.

A few came in much higher, though one, top-ranked Queen’s School of Business in Ontario, reported a staggering 48% without an offer. The average salary reported at international schools was about $94,500 and the average number of students who accepted jobs who got signing bonuses was 33%.

One last thing: if you click on any of the school links included in this post, you'll be directed to the school's 2008 full-time MBA profile on the BusinessWeek web site. The 2009 profiles, which contain the offer, salary, and signing bonus data reported here, won't be ready for another week or so.

--Anne VanderMey

The school, which is affiliated with Chancellor University in Cleveland, will open its door to students on Jan. 4, 2010. Classes will be offered both online and at Chancellor’s Cleveland campus.

"I’m thrilled about the launch of the program in January; everything has really come together," Welch said today. "A terrific team of highly respected academics and experienced practitioners has contributed to courses that do exactly what we envisioned – offer an MBA that is relevant, powerful, and unique, filled with real-world utility and infused with a management philosophy I deeply believe in."

Welch also had some other news to report, naming Steve Kerr as executive director of the Management Institute. Kerr, who led GE’s Leadership Development Center in Crotonville, N.Y., and the executive education program at Goldman Sachs, will work closely with Welch and the school’s faculty on the vision for the school and the academic program.

Kerr says he is looking forward to his new role and creating an experience that will be unique for students.

"Classes will be small, students and faculty will get input from Jack, and the curriculum will be current and relevant to today’s news," he says. "I think the Jack Welch MBA will be unlike any other business degree in the marketplace."

The school’s curriculum will place a heavy emphasis on leadership, people management and strategy and finance. It will also be heavily infused with business know-how from Jack Welch, who will present students with weekly online video updates on breaking business news and topics.

Readers, are you planning on signing up for classes at the Jack Welch Management Institute? Do you think the school will be a success?

The GMAT test’s current ad campaign plays on the bad economy to get grads to consider business school. On the home page, videos of three different characters in dead-end jobs implore you to “take the GMAT, now,” or else languish in career limbo working as a waiter, a “poop scooper,” or, yes, a giant hotdog.

There is something poignant about the well-spoken man in the sharp glasses and hotdog costume describing himself as the “world’s most over-educated wiener.” And it might tug at your heartstrings to see him offering “big, succulent wieners” to passersby on the street. “Instead of humiliating yourself in a job you’re overqualified for, why not take the GMAT and think about going to b-school?” he asks, before earnestly telling the camera, “This is the one time listening to a wiener can actually pay off.”

But though these spots will probably hit close to home for many recent college grads, it might be too soon to be taking life advice from sausages. And it’s unclear how credible the poop scooper is when she says that “earning an MBA is like putting your undergraduate degree on steroids,” then, overwhelmed by the smell, “What are these animals eating?” There are B-schoolers in the unemployment lines like everyone else, and critics argue that the only thing an MBA will put on steroids is student debt.

Then again, in a country that believes in education, these kinds of gentle scare tactics might be just the ticket. And GMAC probably has good reason to be shelling out for ads. The GRE has been mounting a threat to the GMAT’s B-school monopoly. Plus, though GMAT test taking is at record-levels now, this recession’s MBA boom shows some signs of flattening out and possibly subsiding over the next few years. Whether or not that happens depends on whether the B-school applicants of the future want to leave their jobs for two years–or if they have jobs to leave. A talking wiener might strike just the right note for a jobless recovery.

The number one-ranked school this year is York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto, the first Canadian school to top the list in the survey’s 10-year history. Closely following on the heels of Schulich are the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, the Yale School of Management, the Stanford Graduate School of Business (the number one school in the 2007 ranking) and Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business. For the full list of the top 20-ranked schools, click here.

Schulich stood out as the top school because of what the Aspen Institute called the “extraordinary number of courses” available to students with environmental and social content, as well as the large number of relevant academic articles published by the school’s faculty.

Dezsö J. Horváth, dean of the Schulich School of Business, said he was pleased that the school was being recognized for its years of work in this area. The school’s emphasis on sustainability was more important than ever given the “watershed events of the past year,” he says.

"Schulich began laying the groundwork for research and teaching in the areas of business ethics and sustainability back in the early 1990s when few other business schools were doing so," Horváth says. "Today’s number one ranking is recognition of close to two decades of research, innovation and curriculum development at our School."

This year’s ranking, which surveyed 149 business schools from 24 countries, had plenty of good news for business-school students with a green leaning. According to the ranking, the percentage of business schools that require students to take an elective course focused on “business and society” issues continued to increase, jumping from 63% in 2007 to 69% in 2009. And of the schools surveyed, more are offering electives that feature social, environmental and ethical content. Back in 2005, schools offered only 12 courses that met these criteria, a number that jumped to 19 in 2009.

This is an encouraging trend, one that is indicative of just how important schools are taking their responsibility to prepare students for the social and ethical complexities of modern day business, says Rich Leimsider, director of the Aspen Institute’s Center for Business Education.

"In these challenging economic times, the general public, not just scholars, are questioning whether the established models of business are broken," Leimsider says. "Beyond Grey Pinstripes schools are thoughtfully pursuing new approaches. They are preparing students who take a more holistic view of business success, one that measures financial results as well as social and environmental impacts."

Despite the progress being made, not all of the survey’s findings were cause for optimism. Of the schools surveyed, the percentage requiring student to take a core course in social and environmental change remains low, at 30%.

For Adam Aston's take on the ranking, check out his post on the Green Business blog.

Readers, what do you think? Should more schools require students to take these sort of classes as part of the core curriculum?

The career fair was organized by David Chonowski and Chris Peterson, both former U.S. army officers. The pair founded the MBA Veterans Network last fall, while they were second-year MBA students at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Their vision was to help connect military personnel with recruiters from leading companies, as well as raise funds for a charity focused on helping soldiers and their families (a donation this year will be made to Paradox Sports, an organization founded by a United States Military Academy graduate who was injured in Iraq).

So far, it seems like the pair has accomplished their goals. It will be interesting to follow how influential this organization becomes as more military personnel start coming home in the next few months and years. It seems like it has a lot of potential to become a real resource for veterans, as well as companies who want to do more targeted recruiting.

Readers, why do you think companies are interested in hiring more MBA veterans? What special skills do you think they bring to the workforce?

The BlackBerry may still be the phone of choice for the MBA set, but anyone thinking it’s the only one in the running hasn’t clicked through the Apple App Store’s offerings lately.

The store, long the domain of the creative crowd, now has more than 100 applications at least tangentially related to the MBA, all primed for the business students’ phone. Among them, dozens of hand-held programs that promise to impart the entire wisdom of a full MBA course—usually for under $5. Also on offer: refreshers on entity structuring, several dictionaries of accounting and finance terms, a B-school application planner, and GMAT test prep.

The reputation of the businessman as a BlackBerry devotee has probably contributed to the relative paucity of business-friendly apps . For comparison, there are roughly 300 dedicated to calorie counting. But a few developers have found MBAs and their ilk to be a surprisingly receptive audience. For example, the Clear Admit MBA Planner, which sorts through schools’ application requirements and lists deadlines, had already sold dozens of copies at $3.99 a pop by this Wednesday, after being launched on Monday. The rate of sales at the outset, according to Clear Admit, has been “incredibly brisk,” though they declined to give exact numbers.

Ryan Kaminsky, who originally designed and created the app, is a programmer and a second-year MBA at the Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business (Duke Fuqua Full-Time MBA Profile). He decided to develop it after his own travails with the B-school application process–spending nights “waking up in a cold sweat” wondering if he had missed one of the B-school application due dates. Among several other features, the MBA Planner lists BusinessWeek’s top-30 schools’ deadlines in one place.

In this week's cover story, BusinessWeek writer Peter Coy explores the particularly tough job market for job seekers under thirty and the long-term ramifications of graduating into such a tough climate in terms of career progression and salary. He singles out law students, and says that Northwestern University Law School's career center director Bill Chamberlain told him that at least three-quarters of students who graduated in May head their employment deferred for up to a year.

Students ask questions and get help via Twitter; all of their class discussions take place in a wiki format. At the end of the course, they’ll be judged by social media experts on how well they used tools such as Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn to solve some of the advertising firm’s most pressing problems.

Guinan is not the only professor trying to break ground by using Twitter in the classroom. An item in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog last year mentioned a professor who encouraged students to pass notes during class via Twitter, with the idea that it would make for better classroom interaction. Monica Rankin, a history professor at the University of Texas at Dallas, asked her students last spring to use twitter for assignments, questions and classroom feedback. Using TweetDeck, she then projected a large image of their live tweets in front of the classroom, using them as a springboard for classroom discussion. You can watch a video of how she used it in class here.

Rankin wrote about the experiment on her school Web page:

"Overall, I think the twitter experiment was successful primarily because it encouraged students to engage who otherwise would not. Even in smaller classes, only a small number of students actively participate in class discussions," she says. "Students knew that their class participation grade would be partially determined by their involvement in these discussions and most of them seemed comfortable with using the technology to engage with the reading materials."

Readers, should more professors be using Twitter as a classroom learning tool? Do you think it has a place in business school classrooms?