Wm. Polk Carey and W. P. Carey School of Business faculty took off in a Carey-chartered airplane shortly after 10 a.m. Sunday for Shanghai, China.
The latest MBA program of ASU's School of Business will start classes there on Sept. 20.
The MBA program in Shanghai was developed in cooperation with China's Ministry of Finance and will be taught in partnership with the Shanghai National Accounting Institute.
The W. P. Carey School is the first U.S. business school to have a signed partnership agreement with the government of the People's Republic of China.
"We've been a very globally oriented business school for a number of years, and we've had a difficult time achieving that reputation nationally," said Philip Regier, interim dean of the business school. "I think this will solidify that reputation."
Regier will be in China for two weeks, spending one week in Shanghai and one in Beijing, where an MBA program for Motorola executives has been hosted for the past five years.
"In China, there are a lot of American schools that have MBA programs, but this is different," he said.
Carey said one of the main focuses of the program would be China's banking system. He said the school would help "to avoid some of the mistakes that have been made in banks in a communist country where the decisions are made politically instead of rationally."
Classes would be taught by experienced faculty who met strict criteria, said Buck Pei, professor and associate dean for ASU's Asian Pacific American Studies department.
"They have to be the expert in their respective field of studies," he said.
Only five of the 11 instructors are from ASU; the other instructors come from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, New York University, Stanford University and Yale University, among other institutions.
Of the faculty members that will lead the class of 65, only eight speak the language; the others will teach classes with the assistance of a translator.
The 65 students were hand-picked by the Ministry of Finance and include high-ranking officials: the first vice-mayor of Shanghai, the president and CEO of BAOSteel, the president of the fifth largest bank in China, the first vice president of the largest bank in China and the head of the Chinese Commodities Exchange, Regier said.
This first class will graduate in May 2005.
Reach the reporter at michael.miklofsky@asu.edu.
