Over 21 months, the students study the same curriculum as that of USC Marshall’s top-ranked Executive MBA program taught in Los Angeles and north San Diego County. Companies sponsoring students range from multinationals such as Cisco Systems, Siemens and Wal-Mart to family businesses with a regional presence.

Why fly halfway around the world to take the same courses available in California?

Amy Luca, a management supervisor at G2 direct & digital in Burbank, Calif., part of the Grey Global Group advertising company, commutes to Shanghai from Los Angeles for her studies. She does it, she says, because she wants “a differentiated MBA that gives [her] a global perspective.” Luca’s study-group members live in Tokyo, Shanghai, Austin, Seattle and San Francisco. Outside class, they communicate via Web phone calls on Skype and Adobe Acrobat Connect software. “How do you manage global teams remotely?” Luca asks. “You learn the skills through this program.”

Luca has a Trojan connection (her dad, Robert, got his master’s here in 1980), but students with no previous connections to USC are signing up, too. Angela Li of Shanghai enrolled in USC Marshall’s program after considering several others.

“I live here and had the opportunity to choose a world-class executive MBA program right in Shanghai,” she says, noting that USC Marshall’s strong alumni network, excellent faculty and top ranking helped seal her decision. Six months into the program, Li landed a job as Asia-Pacific marketing director for Zebra Technology, an information technology firm.

The keys to the program’s success are globalization and diversity, says Tom Petersen, director of the four-year-old joint venture with Jiao Tong University’s Antai College of Economics and Management.

Both are “built into the group project work – where each team can comprise Koreans, Japanese, Canadians, Americans and Europeans, as well as students from Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China,” Petersen says. “This truly replicates the global marketplace.”

It is this dynamic, fast-moving marketplace that drives the USC Marshall School of Business these days.

When James Ellis moved from his post as USC’s vice provost for globalization to become dean of USC Marshall in April 2007, it was a potent signal that the school intended to ramp up its already considerable international emphasis.

“The globalization of USC Marshall is our No. 1 priority,” Ellis tells anyone who asks about his game plan. He has other goals for the school – social responsibility, capitalizing on Southern California’s entrepreneurial mindset and building on the school’s formidable academic research base – but globalization will infuse just about everything USC Marshall does.

Ellis, who traveled to China almost monthly in his last job, has spent much time building bridges between alumni and Chinese business and government leaders.

He has plenty of Trojans to contact. A recent article in China Economic Review noted that USC Marshall is the alma mater of more leaders in Pacific Rim economies than any other U.S. educational institution.

Ellis has had a pivotal role in establishing USC’s leadership in the Association of Pacific Rim Universities, composed of 37 top research institutions. In May, member schools will convene their business deans in their first-ever gathering at USC to discuss academic collaboration.

“Globalization is hot in business schools,” says finance professor Douglas Joines, USC Marshall’s vice dean of academic programs and past director of experiential learning programs. “All offer some foreign travel. The difference is that elsewhere almost all foreign travel is entirely elective. At Marshall, it’s required for every MBA student.”

Foreign study has been a requirement for USC Marshall MBA students for more than a decade – the first b-school in the United States to have that mandate. Now the school’s leadership plans to further extend international opportunities to all 4,100 of its undergraduates – who comprise a quarter of USC’s total undergraduate student body.

The school exposes its students to the international bug early. Almost as soon as USC Marshall students arrive on campus, they are sent packing. For some, traveling internationally is a first-time experience. Obtaining a passport is one of their initial school assignments.

“When I was vice provost, we decided it would be beneficial if Marshall could send every single undergrad overseas,” says Ellis. “When I was named dean in 2007, some freshmen were already going abroad. The goal became to send all 540-plus freshmen by next year.”

Some 345 freshmen already have signed up to visit Dublin, Hong Kong, Beijing, Shanghai, Santiago or Taipei this spring – nearly double the number sent last year, when the choice was among Beijing, Hong Kong or Shanghai

“We send freshmen because they are more malleable and impressionable, and it also helps them plan their undergraduate curriculum,” explains Ellis.  “After these trips, they may want to add international studies as a minor or do a double-major with East Asian studies. It helps support the philosophy we have: breadth with depth.”

All USC schools are replete with departments, institutes and multidisciplinary programs, but USC Marshall is a particularly complex institution. The school offers five different flavors of MBA, all with similar educational content but different time requirements, at the University Park campus, as well as in Orange County, north San Diego County and Shanghai’s Jiao Tong University. The programs include one for full-time students, another for part-time evening students and an intense, L.A.-based international program for mid-career professionals.

In addition, USC’s Leventhal School of Accounting, which is part of the USC Marshall School, offers a master’s in business taxation and another in accounting. And there’s a master’s in medical management offered to doctors through USC Marshall’s executive education department.

Add 78 doctoral students, 3,500 undergraduate business majors, another 500 accounting majors and more than 400 undergrads pursuing minors in business or accounting. (Business is USC’s most popular minor, drawing students from fine arts, engineering, the sciences, cinematic arts and communication.)

All told, it adds up to more than 5,700 students whom USC Marshall must expose to a global worldview.

Luckily, USC’s location at the hub of the Pacific Rim makes it a natural place for a strong international focus. Even when USC Marshall students are on the University Park campus, they are steeped in other cultures. For the sixth year in a row, USC enrolled more international students than any other American university, according to the annual survey of the New York-based Institute of International Education. USC currently enrolls 7,115 international students from 108 countries.

More than 16 percent of USC Marshall’s undergraduates are international students. More than a quarter of all MBA students are foreign citizens, despite the fact that two of its biggest programs – the part-time evening MBA and Executive MBA – are overwhelmingly filled with working professionals drawn from Southern California. Almost three-fourths of USC Marshall’s Ph.D. candidates are international students.

Tracey Bellack, associate director of international student and employer relations at USC Marshall’s Keenan MBA Career Resource Center, explains why. “International students who want a job here or at a U.S.-based company in their home countries come to USC Marshall because they want to be on one side or the other of the global economy,” she says. “Marshall provides solid business training along with its alumni network to become part of that global bridge.”

Having a global student body enriches learning in sometimes unexpected ways. In a recent international business course taught by Ellis, students were looking at how TV commercials differ from culture to culture. Students from Denmark, Italy and Singapore screened examples of ads from their home countries, explaining differences in cultural and business norms.

“The students taught each other that day,” Ellis says. A USC professor since 1997, he has won top teaching awards from both students and faculty. (His résumé also features stints as CEO of American Porsche Design and as an executive with the Broadway Department Stores.)

The USC Marshall faculty is just as diverse as its students, with faculty and researchers hailing from such countries as Turkey, China, India, Jamaica, Barbados, Spain, Germany, Japan and South Korea.

Finance professor Baizhu Chen, who is academic director of the Global Executive MBA program and teaches in the Executive MBA program, is a good example. He came to the United States from Shanghai in 1985. After receiving his Ph.D. in economics from the University of Rochester, he taught at the Claremont Graduate University before coming to USC in 1994. Here, he has led graduate student trips to China for nine years.

“Most students have never seen an overseas factory before,” Chen says. “They expect sweatshops and are surprised at the state-of-the-art facilities. They also have the experience of meeting with CEOs of foreign companies and seeing the challenges and opportunities they face.”

The trips change students’ perceptions of both overseas business and culture, Chen says. He makes sure that the trips are not all factory floors and boardrooms. “Students are encouraged to get into back alleys to see how ordinary people eat and live,” he says.

For students who have not traveled overseas, the experience can be life-changing.

In 2007, a 13-member MBA team went to Sydney, Australia, to present findings from a summer-long research project to business leaders at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation’s annual summit of world economic ministers. 

The USC Marshall team – led by professors Carl W. Voigt, Ravi Kumar and Dennis Schorr – researched “rules of origin” provisions in free-trade agreements affecting 21 countries around the Pacific Rim. They found wildly conflicting and self-defeating provisions that compromise any chance the free-trade agreements will live up to their intent.

The study was so highly regarded, Voigt says, that it will help shape future international trade regulations. The team has been invited to continue working on the issue.

Team leader Sean Haran, a second-year MBA student, still sounds awestruck about the experience. “I realized we were one step removed from giving world leaders advice. We gave our presentation and the response was ‘This is exactly what we need.’ ”

Haran says he is particularly grateful for the global opportunities he has had at USC. “I came to USC Marshall with no international experience or international travel. Within one year, I’ve been exposed to real international business issues. It dramatically changes the way I will do business and will really help my career.”

USC Marshall students are fanning out across Latin America as well. Voigt regularly leads undergraduate teams on class visits to maquiladoras in Tijuana and to the bustling port in Ensenada. The teams use the trips in developing business plans for U.S.-based companies considering entering the Mexican market.

Last spring, some MBA students traveled to Mexico and Cuba for their required trip through USC Marshall’s Pacific Rim Education Program, called PRIME.  Amar Arekapudi, an IBM consultant before enrolling at USC, says he will carry the experience with him for a lifetime.

“One of the major takeaways for me was seeing how passionate people were about their careers in Cuba,” says Arekapudi. “Whether we spoke to professors, cigar makers, rum masters or bio-technicians, each and every one of them loved what they did to a huge extent. Taking major differences in salary out of the equation allowed individuals to choose a career they really wanted.”

The PRIME program sends each student to one or two countries. This year’s destinations are Brazil/Argentina, Mexico/Chile, Vietnam/Thailand, China and Japan.

The school also offers academic opportunities well beyond the Pacific Rim.

Marshall’s evening MBA students visited India in 2006 and 2007, meeting with senior managers from top Indian companies, including such heavyweights as Tata Consulting Services (chairman Ratan Tata is a USC trustee), Infosys (an information technology company) and Wipro Technologies (a software services firm).

“All the companies we visit are highly regarded,” says Shantanu Dutta, vice dean for research strategy and advancement, who led the trips. “We went to ICICI Bank, considered the most innovative bank in India. We also saw the research and development office of Amazon.com in Bangalore. The students got a firsthand experience of how product development occurs from a faraway office.”

In 2007, five MBA students and one undergrad traveled to Botswana at the invitation of the country’s Anglican diocese and a nonprofit organization. Led by MBA program director Lida Jennings and associate professor David Belasco, the two-week trip kicked off a lengthy project to create and present a sustainable business plan for two international schools the diocese wants to build. While in Botswana, the team visited 20 public and private schools and worked closely with Anglican bishop Trevor Mwamba and the country’s education ministry.

The trip deeply affected team member Deborah Kimball, who is pursuing both an MBA from USC Marshall and an M.D. at the Keck School of Medicine of USC.

“Going there, visiting orphanages, meeting the people and doing a business plan for something that makes such a difference, for people that so need help” made her coursework feel vital and relevant, she says.

Graduate travel has been an integral part of a USC Marshall education for so long that the staggering numbers involved are sometimes taken for granted. For example, during any given year, about 700 MBA students are globetrotting, many of them presenting case studies to actual companies. Prior to their trips, they tackle a problem facing a foreign company or branch of a multi-national firm. Once on foreign soil, they present their solutions to managers of the firms they’re studying.

The news at USC Marshall, its administrators say, is that such opportunities now are being extended to freshmen.

In 2005, USC Marshall was the country’s first business school to offer freshman an international learning and travel component. That program is now two: Learning about International Commerce (LINC) and the Global Leadership Program.

In the months prior to the spring-break trips, freshman cram in as much background as possible on the countries they’re going to visit. For those in the Global Leadership Program, an honors program, fall semester is spent on campus getting an overview of global leadership issues. In spring, the curriculum focuses on the country they will visit, including how business is conducted and how the country’s history and culture impact its economy.

Students in the LINC program take a semester-long class in international commerce, wrapped around their spring-break trip overseas. 

Faculty members with significant experience in the countries lead all the trips. They receive heavy logistical support from USC Marshall’s undergraduate Office of Student Services in obtaining visas, scheduling consulting casework and arranging company visits. The trips are generously subsidized by the Lord Foundation, leaving students to pay only between $1,100 and $1,350 for the week-long visits, says Kim D. West, USC Marshall’s associate dean of undergraduate programs.

Meetings with business and academic leaders are augmented by opportunities to connect with overseas alumni, so students can begin building international Trojan business networks.

Marshall professors make sure that the trips include visits to factories as well as meetings with business leaders and academicians. Many students, it turns out, have never been inside a factory and lack a firsthand understanding of how things are made.

Associate professor Shiing-wu Wang, last year’s Global Leadership Program director, says that trips to companies such as Bao Steel, China’s largest steelmaker, literally change some students’ career paths. “The exposure to a global experience like this motivated quite a few who came back and decided they wanted to work in a foreign company and study Mandarin,” Wang says.

For Jeniffer Hsu, a business administration major who traveled to Beijing last spring with the LINC program, it was the experience of a lifetime. “It opened my eyes to the endless opportunities – as well as to my potential competition,” she says.

The spring-break trip in 2007 made such a deep impression that 24 of the 187 participants returned to China a few months later for summer internships.

Undergraduates also can take part in study-abroad programs at 16 universities around the world. USC Marshall’s Winslow Maxwell Global Summer Internship Program links juniors and seniors with internships at multinational companies, and provides two weeks of intensive cultural and language training before they leave. Another program, EXCEL, for students in at least their sophomore year, sends groups overseas with faculty leadership at various times during the academic year.

For many students, international trips are the gateway to an international career. A.D. Naik MBA ’05 took a USC Marshall trip to Hong Kong. Today, he is director of finance for office supply company Avery Dennison in that city.

“I had always aspired to work overseas, particularly in Asia,” he says. “However, this was just a dream until I spent a week in China as part of a Marshall Executive MBA trip. I was so enamored of the opportunities in China that I returned from this trip with the goal of making this dream a reality.”

Firms of all types are eager to hire USC Marshall’s internationally savvy graduates. By Commencement in 2007, 83 percent of USC Marshall MBA grads had secured jobs or had pending offers. According to the Keenan Career Resource Center, the average base salary for those grads was $91,000, up more than 10 percent from 2006. Average signing bonuses were up 24 percent since 2005 to nearly $20,000.

USC Marshall also does well in national rankings of business schools, but administrators are wary of citing them, as business school ranking is a growth industry in itself, with no fewer than 29 publications printing lists.

Ellis doesn’t put great stock in the statistics. “You don’t run your school to the rankings, the same way executives don’t run their companies to the quarters,” he says.

As Ellis talks about the future, his natural enthusiasm bounds off to other parts of the globe where USC Marshall needs to improve its presence.

“We’re weak in Latin America. We need to be in Brazil,” he says. “And we need to do a better job in India. Did you know that soon India will have more members in its middle class than America has citizens?”

No doubt that in a very short time, students from around the globe will be gathering in a classroom in a university somewhere in India, learning business the USC Marshall way.

The red areas denote countries with ongoing USC Marshall programs.

Think Global, Learn Global The worldwide reach of USC Marshall spans everything from specific class-related short trips to longer-term experiences, such as the Winslow Maxwell Global Summer Internships, study-abroad semesters and the Global Executive MBA program in Shanghai.

Ellen Paris, who was a staff writer for Forbes for 12 years and a management columnist for Entrepreneur magazine, is the editor of Palm Desert magazine and personal finance columnist for Palm Springs Life magazine.

If you have questions or comments on this article, please send them to magazines@usc.edu.