Now, outsourcing joins the MBA curriculum

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">Elissa Dvorak and 20 other MBA students from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business decided to spend spring break this year travelling around India. But the trip was not meant to be a vacation. Under the auspices of the MBA programme, Dvorak and her classmates spent 10 days learning about outsourcing from local and global firms in cities like Bangalore, New Delhi, Mumbai.<br /><br />"Outsourcing is a subject we need to know about if we want to be competitive in future," said Dvorak, 29, who is in her second year of graduate school.Outsourcing has become a prime subject for business students. Thousands of white-collar jobs are moving overseas every year, and at least 3.3 million jobs in service industries, accounting for $136 billion in wages, will leave US by 2015 for lower-cost countries, according to Forrester Research.<br /><br />"It’s not something you can ignore," said Dvorak, who had just finished an eight-week course in outsourcing that she was required to take before the trip. Other business schools besides Indiana are offering courses or other instruction in offshore outsourcing, and students are signing up in an effort to add to their managerial tool kits. <br /><br />"You hear about outsourcing all the time these days," said Amir Nahai, 26, a first-year student at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. "But you don’t really know what the advantages and disadvantages are." Tuck does not offer a course in outsourcing, but it provides the opportunity for overseas exposure to the subject. <br /><br />Interest in outsourcing "is really booming," said Joseph A. Massey, director of the Centre for International Business at Tuck. Since the inception of the consultancy programme six years ago, the number of participating students has grown to 70 from 19.<br /><br />Other MBA programmes, like those at Cornell, Stanford and Bentley College, also offer looks at offshore outsourcing. Bentley just began a course called "I.T. Offshoring," to be followed by a 14-day trip to India.<br /><br />"India is a leader in terms of services provided - about $6 billion worth," said Donald Chand, a Bentley professor of computer information systems, who taught the class. "And it’s an English-speaking country. The opportunity to continue to expand there will be a big issue for the next generation of managers." <br /><br />At MIT’s Sloan School of Management, two business professors, Amar Gupta and Lester C. Thurow, have added a course called "Offshoring" to the spring curriculum. The class, devoted to the subject of sending jobs overseas, reached its 70-student limit within 24 hours of opening for enrolment. It’s a hot topic," said Gupta, pointing out that in some cases, MBA students go overseas themselves, "to China, to India, wherever, and they’ll need to be able to manage operations irrespective of where they’re posted."<br /><br />Wharton and several other top business schools, including the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business and the Stern School of Business at New York University, say they address outsourcing when necessary in classes about international economics.<br /><br />Gupta predicted that student enthusiasm for outsourcing classes would grow as the global market expanded, and that more business schools would start courses in the subject. "It’s not something that’s going to be talked about for only one or two years. We’ll still be studying this carefully for a very long time." <br /><br /><span style="" font-style:="" italic="">NYT News Service</span></div> </div>