In Hunt for Students, Business Schools Go Global

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The Global Campus

One school that has significantly expanded its international recruiting footprint is Duke University's Fuqua School of Business (Fuqua Full-Time MBA Profile). The school now has five new campuses overseas as part of its global campuses network, with staff in Delhi, St. Petersburg, Dubai, London, and Shanghai. This has allowed Fuqua to attend MBA fairs in Abu Dhabi and Cairo, make inroads into smaller regions in China outside of Beijing and Shanghai and to reach new markets within Eastern and Western Europe, says Liz Riley Hargrove, Fuqua's admissions officer. The school was even able to send its Middle East regional director to the QS MBA Fair in Kazakhstan last spring, one of two U.S. business schools in attendance.

"We've been able to tap into new markets in a way that we have not necessarily had the bandwidth to do before," Hargrove says. "Having someone on the ground is key. It gives us more power, you could say, and more opportunity.

Some admissions officers are combining forces to reach out to students in new markets. Chicago's Booth School, Dartmouth's Tuck School, the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business (Darden Full-Time MBA Profile), and Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management(Kellogg Full-Time MBA Profile) organized a joint trip to Ghana this year to recruit students, the first event of its kind for the schools. The trip was a chance to get some valuable face time with prospective students, as well as an opportunity to carve out more of a presence in the country, says Booth's Martinelli.

"We've been attracting a pretty strong number of applicants out of Africa, but we haven't spent a lot of time going there beyond having students do events over the holiday breaks," Martinelli says.

Creative Recruitment

Schools are also finding new ways to reach out to students. The Tuck School has run a "Student Ambassadors" program for the past three years, where students volunteer for the admissions office when they are back in their home country over school breaks. The admissions office has 80 foreign students participating in the program this year, hailing from South Africa, Mexico, Spain, Brazil, and elsewhere. Students are encouraged to present a business plan to staff on how they want to approach recruiting in their home country and, if approved by the admissions office, are given a budget. One group used its funds to obtain the names of GMAT test takers in its target country and to contact them personally. Others host small group get-togethers and large receptions, says Dawna Clark, Tuck's admissions director. "It's a creative way to have events where admissions representatives don't always have to be there," Clarke says.

In a similar vein, Darden launched a new program this fall called "Admissions City Captains," which enlists Darden 2009 graduates working in 40 cities around the world to help recruit applicants. The captains' responsibilities include interviewing promising applicants, welcoming students at admissions events in their cities, and having coffee with students interested in applying to the program. The program arose because the challenging economic climate was prompting an increasing number of foreign students to return home to work after graduation, rather than stay in the U.S., says Sara Neher, Darden's admissions director. It's just one of the ways the school is trying to innovate when it comes to attracting students from new regions, she says.

"In the past, a larger percentage of our graduates went to New York. Now, they can't go to New York or don't want to go to New York, so they are all over the place, which is really great for us in terms of admissions outreach," Neher says

Tuition Free

New scholarship programs are also helping lure students from more distant countries to U.S. business schools. One of the more innovative ones is the Share Scholarship offered at the Thunderbird School of Global Management (Thunderbird Full-Time MBA Profile). It's a full-tuition scholarship designed to attract foreign students who normally don't have the financial means to come to graduate school in the U.S., says Jay Bryant, Thunderbird's admissions director. Through the program, the school has been able to attract students from developing countries such as Colombia, Jordan, Peru, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe.

"We're seeing students now from countries that we definitely have not seen represented here on campus in a significant amount of time," Bryant says.

Reem Nassar, a 26-year-old Jordanian, is one of a handful of first-year Thunderbird MBA students who received the Share Scholarship this year. Nassar, who did her undergraduate degree in Jordan, says she desperately wanted to attend school in the U.S. but never would have able to afford it on her own. After working in business development for three years and traveling to many Middle Eastern companies for work, she wanted to obtain business skills that would allow her to bridge the cultural gaps she'd observed between Western and Middle Eastern companies. She was excited when a representative from the Thunderbird admissions office came to visit Jordan, and even more impressed when she learned the school had a program geared toward students like her, she says.

"When I found out I got the scholarship last spring, I almost woke up the neighborhood because I was so excited," says Nassar. "I didn't expect to receive the scholarship because it is very competitive and in all of Jordan, just one student was to be selected. I'm still so excited about it. It is just like a dream come true."

Damast is a reporter for Businessweek.com.