'They look where the jobs are and where the growth is and they get a lot of excitement about what is happening in Asia.'

Admissions offices at local business schools have started accepting applications for next year's class. And the number of candidates is expected to increase from this year - at the likely expense of MBA programmes in the US and Europe, where job prospects and postgraduate opportunities are relatively grim.

The Graduate Management Admission Council, which offers the GMAT test required by most MBA programmes, reported the number of test scores sent to Hong Kong-based business schools nearly doubled between 2005 and last year to 6,731, reflecting an increase in the number of applications.

However, that was still just 0.84 per cent of the global total last year.

According to the Financial Times' Global MBA Rankings 2010, HKUST, founded in 1991, now ranks No 9 among full-time programmes, tied with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

HKUST is four spots ahead of Dartmouth College's Tuck School of Business in the US and is 19 places ahead of University of California Berkeley's Haas School of Business. The survey, which ranked 100 business schools, has been published for 12 years and is based on data gathered from the institutions and their alumni.

'It is unusual to move in 19 years from zero to a leading business school,' DeKrey said. 'We got there a bit early.'

Other Asian-based MBA programmes are not far behind. Chinese University's programme ranked No28 on the FT list. Overall, six schools from the region cracked the top 30, including France's Insead, which has a full-time campus in Singapore. That is up from just two in the 2007 rankings.

QS, a higher education consultant, included 36 Asian and Australian business schools in its 2010 ranking of the top 200 global institutions, up from just 10 in 2004. The survey polled more than 5,000 employers.

The Economist's 2010 global ranking of MBA programmes put the Asian MBAs farther back in the pack. The University of Hong Kong came in at 48th and HKUST at 52nd. Those schools were No 2 and No 3 in the Asia and Australia category.

Such academic rankings are taken with a grain of salt by university administrators and prospective students alike because of the variables involved in calculating them.

Asian MBA programmes have propelled themselves up the rankings mostly by outpacing their counterparts in job placement-related categories.

For instance, more than nine out of 10 students from HKUST and Chinese University had jobs within three months of graduation, according to the FT survey. By comparison, London Business School, the top-ranked programme in the FT poll, reported eight out of 10 were employed by that point. And just three in four students from University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business had found work within that time.

Among the top 10 programmes in the FT ranking, HKUST graduates had the second-largest salary percentage increase in their post-MBA jobs. Both HKUST and Chinese University students reported, on average, more than 125 per cent higher income, exceeding the increase recorded by graduates from the London Business School, for example.

Students at the Hong Kong programmes, on average, earned lower base salaries of between US$100,000 and US$120,000, while LBS students earned just over US$140,000.

'If you are a Westerner and you get an MBA [in Asia] and know the language, it will give you a big boost getting jobs in the region, especially in China,' said T.J. Wong, a dean at the faculty of business administration of Chinese University.

Wong said 35 per cent of current Chinese University full-time MBA students already have received job offers after completing just the first year of the 11/2-year programme.

Eunice Ng, a director at the executive and professional recruitment agency Avanza Consulting, said MBA programmes such as HKUST and CUHK 'have already earned their reputations and companies obviously would like to embrace local talent so they have to go to local schools for top-notch graduates'.

Still, some employers continue to prefer graduates of longer-established MBA programmes in Europe or the US such as Harvard, Wharton and Stanford.

For instance, Ng said, an international investment bank recently restricted its recruitment pool to these Western programmes.

'The batch of people they hired is coming from Harvard, Wharton, or other Ivy League schools,' she said.

'Some employers still think those Western universities may have an advantage' such as turning out graduates with better communication skills, said Andrew Hu, a senior associate at executive search firm Bo Le Associates.

But Hu noted that the recent waves of jobseekers coming from local MBA programmes are much more competitive than in past years. In addition, students coming from outside the region who would like to work in Asia might get a boost from studying in Hong Kong because it signalled their commitment and familiarity with the region.

Still, he cautions that an MBA degree, regardless of which institution it is from, is only one component of a hiring decision. 'It will be added value, but it's not a prerequisite for jobs' in Asia, Hu said. 'And at the end of the day human resources departments still think that work exposure is the key.'

And job recruiters warn that Hong Kong's MBA graduates may have even more trouble selling the value of their degrees to companies based in Europe and North America where they are not as well known.

Wong said his Chinese University programme had Western graduates who had planned all along to return to their home countries after some seasoning in Asia. Many were hired by multinationals in Europe immediately after the MBA course, he said.

'They are hired a lot of times because of their exposure to the Asian market,' Wong said. 'So even though they go back to Europe or America, [they work for] global firms that have connections to Asia or the Asian market.'

Sachin Tipnis, an executive director of the MBA programme at the University of Hong Kong, also said some of his school's students had returned to the US and Europe as 'so-called Asia experts'.

For example, he said one HKU graduate worked for a packaging company in Vienna, Austria, and converted contacts made while studying in Hong Kong into clients for his new employer.

In the previous full-time class, Tipnis said there were about 50 students and he expected about the same number in the coming year. Now, he said, students from Japan and South Korea were being sponsored by their companies to join the school's MBA programme. 'They were told that it was a requirement for them to study in Asia because they are grooming them to be the next general managers in Asia.'

To compete for students worldwide, HKUST has combined forces with China Europe International Business School in Shanghai, Nanyang Business School in Singapore and the Indian School of Business in Hyderabad to hold recruiting events overseas.

'Instead of coming for one of the schools, they get to hear from all four so the impact of volume for all of us' improves, DeKrey said. 'And we're all different so we are not worried about stealing each other's applicants.' HKUST had 115 full-time students in last year's class and is targeting an increase to 120 students in the next intake. DeKrey expected the admissions office to receive about six times that number of applications.

An added attraction of Hong Kong MBA programmes is they are generally less expensive than counterparts in the US and Europe. The programmes usually last for just one or 11/2 years and have ranged from about HK$363,000 to HK$420,000. By comparison, Stanford's two-year MBA programme costs US$53,118 (HK$411,792) for just the first year's tuition, according to its website.

HKUST has partnered with 56 MBA programmes around the world that allow students to study for a while at other universities. Today, more exchange students are coming than going.

'It used to be the other way around where we had to send students out and I had trouble getting space,' DeKrey said. 'Now the tables have turned.'