Duke’s Fuqua School had made international inroads with its Global EMBA (GEMBA) using Internet technology. But it found a new market when Deutsche Bank, based in Frankfurt, invited Fuqua to establish an "American-style" EMBA program right in Germany, said Donna Spinella, assistant dean and director of cross-continent MBA programs for Fuqua.

"For a number of years, Duke had a productive relationship with several major firms in continental Europe, specifically in Germany," Spinella said. "The decision to go to another continent at all was partly a reflection of the fact that we realized sometimes the mountain needs to come to Mohammed. And also, quite specifically in response to requests from enterprises like Deutsche Bank, the German Stock Exchange and Glaxo Wellcome," she said.

European companies wanted their junior management employees to receive Duke’s degree, but they didn’t want to send students to the U.S. and lose them for two years in a full-time program, or possibly for good, Spinella said.

ESCP-EAP’s master’s degrees in management are, on the other hand, aimed directly at the full-time student just out of undergraduate school. During the three-year program, each student is required to rotate through three of the four campuses —in Britain, France, Spain and Germany—spending nine months at each one. The courses are offered in the local language. The students also must intern at a company in that country. ESCP-EAP also offers a shorter master’s in European business degree, completed in one year, with six months spent in two different countries. Its English-language MBA degree is offered in Paris.

Chicago’s interest in having the European and Asian presence is essentially to extend its b-school reputation beyond the United States, Kooser said. "We felt that our corporate constituencies are increasingly international and global and we needed to be that way, too. We needed to have faculty spending more time abroad, learning what was going on in Europe, or Asia, and basically have a cross-fertilization," Kooser said. "We provide our educational product to that part of the world and we learn more about what is going on in the business community in Europe or Asia by being there."

Perhaps a more risky involvement is the one that Ohio has chosen in India, where only in the ‘90s did the government become interested in foreign direct investment.

"Part of working in India is trying to figure out the market there," Kiefer said. The school aligned itself with Manipal, a deans’ school that offers medical and engineering training, just to gain some immediate recognition. But the school had no business program. "We’ve had to play it by ear," Kiefer said, "to the extent we are trying to determine the right intake cycle and looking at the curriculum constantly to make sure it fits the market expectations in India."

Much of the large enterprise is still state-owned. But India is globalizing by reducing investment barriers and starting to privatize its state-owned enterprises. They have looked to reorganize them along asset-based management models, Kiefer said.

The Fuqua School of Business Europe gained some reputational insurance in Germany by rehiring its retired business dean, Tom Keller, to start up the campus in Frankfurt. He is completing his assignment, and the school is looking for a new permanent dean, Spinella said. Also on that staff in Frankfurt are administrators in marketing and in operations, both European, plus a technology person and a secretary.

"The faculty is all Duke-affiliated," Spinella said. "Many are regular tenured faculty. Having enough faculty to staff these programs is probably the number one problem on everyone’s mind." A team of faculty is required to deliver the EMBA program in Europe, even though they may not all be there at the same time. The team works together on the syllabus, works through all of the materials, the exercises and the assignments long before the class begins. Then one of the team members flies to Frankfurt to teach it.

"In some ways we’ve got the same thing in both places, pretty closely. And shaded and flavored differently depending on the faculty member’s own way of delivering things, but everyone is learning the same stuff at the same time, basically," Spinella said.

Any non-Fuqua faculty are from comparable institutions, she said. "They are all faculty whom I suspect we would hire away if we could. So they certainly meet the standards of our faculty here. And since they all have to work together as a team, people who are not on the faculty here all of the time are always working with someone who is."

Chicago sent a deputy dean, right below the dean, to be responsible for getting Barcelona up and running, Kooser said. The deputy dean hired a staff of seven, including a program director from Barcelona, to manage the program and figure out the lay of the land, while the deputy dean maintained the connection between Chicago and Barcelona. Kooser himself had a similar responsibility with Singapore’s campus.

Does the faculty tire of the travel and disruptions? Because Chicago does not use any outside MBA faculty for this program, "We worried about it," Kooser said. "But in Barcelona we have not found that to be the case. Our program is structured so that the faculty member makes two one-week trips to Barcelona. It is not that we are sending them for three or five months. We have a large enough faculty that we can rotate the assignments so that a number who wanted to go get the chance. If somebody says he or she doesn’t want to go one year, that is just fine." Surprisingly, some of the Chicago faculty prefer Barcelona as their teaching location, he said.

The hardship of teaching overseas has to be taken into account, Kiefer said. But Ohio University, like other schools, just designs a compensation package to allow for the inconvenience. For some faculty it might be an overseas bonus, for others it might be more time off, or an extended travel compensation that allows a faculty member to make side trips to Asian cities on the way to and from the campus.

The size of the enrollment at the India campus so far only warrants a four- to five-week stay for the faculty member teaching a particular course. To save the taxes and living expenses of a U.S. staff member in India, Ohio hired an Indian national to run many of the day-to-day operations.

"The Center for International Business Education and Development in Ohio handles all the records for the students and the admissions process," Kiefer said. A team of faculty goes on site to do extensive interviews as part of the admissions process, but record keeping is handled at home.

It is too early for some of the schools to know if the travel to overseas campuses will become tiresome. "We found that the standard of living improved while we were in Malaysia," Kiefer said, "so early pioneers had a very different experience than those who went later in the program.

"If it ever became a burden in the sense that people didn’t want to do it, we’d stop," Kiefer said. "There’s no point to do these programs unless they benefit your faculty."

"The real choice you have to make operating overseas," Plosser said, "is are you going to teach with your faculty or somebody else’s? That is the most expensive question. If you say, ‘We will put our name on it, but we don’t care who teaches it,’ then basically you are franchising your name.

"Both in our programs in Europe and Australia, we felt very strongly that we want the bulk of that teaching to be done by our faculty," he said. "It is our degree and we are not going to farm it out to some lesser quality faculty without very careful monitoring and control mechanisms," Plosser said.

Part of the difficulty that Rochester had in Australia before that campus folded, was trying to deploy the faculty at two distant locations, Sydney and Nyenrode, on opposite sides of the world, as well as in New York, Plosser said.

"I think the real issue, fundamentally, that schools have to face, whether they have a partner or don’t have a partner, is who and how are you going to staff the program, whose faculty are you going to use? Where will they come from? How do you get them there?"

About two-thirds of the faculty in Bern are Rochester’s; the other one-third is made up of Rochester-trained people, Plosser said. "We have, over five to 16 years, developed a small cadre of about five people. Some were Ph.D.s of ours; some we hired over there and they have proven successful in meeting our standards for course content as well as teaching talent. They give the programs more local flavor." All of the management of the Rochester programs is handled in New York by the associate dean for executive programs.

Concerns about having enough faculty willing to travel in the future is always an issue, Plosser said. His school has been overseas long enough that faculty know international teaching is part of their obligation. In recruiting new faculty, the topic is discussed. Some consider it a plus, and some do not; but it is never a surprise.

"We use it as an attraction when it is appropriate," Plosser said. "It is a portfolio problem. You have to make sure everybody doesn’t have to do the same thing. But you also have to have enough faculty who are willing to do the range of activities that the institution has to do. That’s a little more difficult for small schools than it is for big schools."

Webster University employs both its U.S. faculty and local faculty in its European locations, Evans said. "We have a pretty vigorous faculty exchange program. When people move from the U.S. to Geneva, we also have people coming from Geneva to teach in the U.S,.or another campus in Europe or in Asia."

"The presence of the United Nations in Geneva, with so many more internationals there, gives us access to some of the top minds in the world who have credentials from outstanding world institutions," said Akande, Webster’s business dean. "It is a unique availability of adjunct faculty."

Webster’s unabashed internationalism is a recruiting tool for faculty who select the school in significant degree because of the international aspect, Evans said. "In our modular systems, for a two-month period a professor could go teach an international marketing course that the professor has taught for eight years in the U.S. and now go teach it in Thailand, China or Geneva. It’s an attractive proposition, valuable to the individuals but also paying dividends to the institution," Evans said.

Campus directors for Webster are usually recruited in the United States as an employee of the main school. They then hire their staff from the nationals in their location, or from among the ex-patriot Americans.

ESCP/EAP clearly has an easier time with faculty travel, Casler said. Most of the faculty members are native to the country where they teach. And, when faculty do have to travel to another campus, the flying time is nowhere near as long as an overseas trip.

For Fuqua, it was corporate supporters who said, "We’ll help you get started, we’ll help you learn who to talk to." "You have to have people on the ground to make the introductions, make the connections," Spinella said. "It is really good to have those connections on the ground, which can be people at other universities. You need a friend."

In India, Ohio had the faculty relative at the "Times." For Rochester in Bern, it is a Rochester Ph.D. student who acts as local program director.

Webster’s Evans said, "Doing business in the U.S. is relatively seamless. We are subject to different accrediting bodies, but those are not nearly so complicated as trying to figure out how to set up a corporate entity in another country, or enter an educational system in another country. You also have to establish your name in a place where you don’t have a name, you have to establish the value of an American credential in communities that are proud of their own national credentials. You have to face the suspicion that you are some kind of a carpetbagger. It’s a big job."

Rochester’s Bern program is set up in a corporate training facility owned by a Swiss bank corporation.

Webster began teaching in rented quarters but has since purchased land and built its own facility in Geneva. "It was a huge undertaking when we did this," Evans said. "We were only about 10 years away from being a private, Catholic women’s college in 1978. It was a big leap for us to go to Geneva."

Chicago’s Barcelona and Singapore sites are rented. In Barcelona classes are taught in a renovated 100-year-old building with only the facade intact. In Singapore, the classroom facility is a 118-year- old home, with 23,000 square feet of renovated space.

In Barcelona, Chicago could establish a branch of the big university; but in Singapore, it had to create a single new entity, Kooser said.

Webster set up a close version of a 501C3 enterprise in Geneva, a foundation that provides education as a not-for-profit. In other European locations, Webster found similar models.

"In London, we ran into a different problem," Evans said. "As a foreign entity, we were not eligible for what the British call charity status, so we created a company — limited by private guarantee." Courses were offered under the corporate structure of a company, but with the understanding that because the directors of the company were senior administrators of Webster University, there were no shares. "They had liability only and no benefits," said Evans.

Because of the multiplication of MBA programs in London, Webster has since partnered with Regents College and no longer operates independently there, although it still offers a Webster MBA.

In Thailand, Webster works with a foundation that established a private university under Thai law. The students at the campus in Thailand are students at Webster; but legally they are students of Webster University Thailand, a recognized Thai, private university.

Both Chicago and Rochester said they take a two-pronged approach, with mass marketing to go after individuals through advertising, direct mail and information sessions at GMAC Forums. The second prong is to talk with companies so that they are aware of the program and are willing to support their employees.

"The specific executions of our marketing could be different in Chicago, Barcelona and Singapore," Kooser said. "The advertising will be slightly different, the companies different, the way we talk about the program may be slightly different; but the overall strategy is pretty much the same.

"One thing we found overseas is the decision to attend a program such as ours is 85 to 90 percent an individual decision," Kooser said. "It is not a company saying ‘You will go’; it is a student saying, ‘I’d like to go, will you help me pay for it?’ Our goal really is to make sure the companies are aware of our program, and know of its quality, so the Chicago program makes the approved list. We very much have to get to the individual who is making the decision, even though 70 to 80 percent of students are financially supported by their companies."

"In some cases," Plosser said, "companies are sending people. We want to make sure we are making the companies aware of the program and what value we offer to them. But at the same time, we are also marketing to individuals because you want individuals pushing their companies to do things."

For the four campuses of the ESCP/EAP, local marketing is done in each country to make sure the message is shaped to appeal to the local audience, Casler said. Marketing efforts aimed at other European countries, and on a smaller scale to Asia and the United States, are created in France. This approach apparently works because, despite the competitive European marketplace, ESCP/EAP’s courses are fully enrolled, Casler said.

"If an institution is used to periods in which its initial investment is paid back in a matter of months or a year," Akande said, "they are going to find themselves hard pressed if they move into running programs overseas. If they recognize and plan for the fact that lead time is going to be a bit longer and if they see, and have as part of their educational mission, the wealth this network brings to the people in the institution, then they can go forward."

Some compared the experience to what a corporation must go through when it expands overseas. The complications increase considerably.

"If you are going to go in," Kiefer said, "you have to give yourself at least three years to determine whether or not what you are doing makes sense from the standpoint of the college. And that should allow you to have sufficient time to see what kind of market response there is to the offer you make."

But Rochester did not need to wait that long to discover that its timing in Sydney was off. The school set up an MBA program in the late 1980s, just when the economy of Australia was going bust, Plosser said. Within two years, Rochester had to pull out.

"With Australia, our timing was incredibly bad. We entered the market at a time when the Australian economy went into a tailspin," Plosser said. "Companies were cutting back and it was not a time to be venturing in with new programs of the type we were offering. When companies get tight, usually the first thing that goes is education money. The situation was exacerbated by the fact that we were an expensive, private institution, new in Australia. At the time, the country had no other private universities. It was very difficult for us to make significant inroads to make that program a success. It probably would have required far more resources and investment of our time than we were prepared to make to turn it into a success. We pulled the plug about 1991, after two classes."

Similarly, assuming a strong economy, Chicago expects success in both locations. "The target number of students was 84, for the first year; that is capacity," Kooser said. "To hit target in year one is pleasing. Response has been very, very solid. We are in pretty good shape for the coming year." Target enrollments are the same at each campus because the faculty basically design their courses to deal with that size class.

For Ohio University to maintain itself in India, the program has to justify itself financially, Kiefer said. "So far we’ve made our breaks in terms of our enrollments and costs; but at some point, you have to, from a monetary standpoint, ask yourself whether or not this is something we want to do, or ought to be doing. Although you are never going to make yourself wealthy doing these programs, by the same token you don’t want to cheat the college of other opportunities it may have just to stay with the program. You ideally want a program with a certain strength. You want a good response. The market has to be increasingly receptive to it, otherwise, to me, there is no point."

Plosser said the Bern operation is increasing in size, yet, "I think the jury is still out regarding how successful these types of operations will be for the long term. Will technology replace the need to have physical teaching going on?"

"If over a period of time, you can’t attract enough students to pay the light bills, you are not going to be able to make a financial or educational go of it," Webster’s Evans said. "A program has to be of a certain size for the students to have the benefit of their fellow students. It is basically an enrollment-driven issue. Students have to see the value in what you are offering because then that eases the question of recruitment of future generations of students. Your satisfied customers are your best sales people."