A new language program at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School aims to help international students interested in a post-MBA career in the United States find—and keep—jobs. Despite the current high demand for MBA graduates, many international students still struggle to get a job offer — or even an interview. At Kenan-Flagler, for instance, only about 40% of the recruiters will meet with foreign nationals. The chief reasons for such resistance: the limited number of U.S. work visas and language deficiencies.

There’s not much business schools can do about the visa shortage, but the new Honing Executive English Language Skills (HEELS) program helps assess students’ English-language skills, provides objective feedback, and then offers specially designed courses to improve those skills. The MBA Career Management Center offers HEELS in partnership with linguists at The World Company. It requires all of its foreign MBA students — more than a quarter of the class — to take an oral and written test when they arrive on campus. The students are rated on a nine-point scale based on their accent, pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and other factors. To boost their scores, students can pay a fee to take special classes taught by linguists that focus on speaking English in a business context.

The school’s press release says the interactive HEELS courses are taught in small groups and focus on accent modification, grammar and vocabulary issues, and modify non-verbal communication that might be misinterpreted by U.S. managers, coworkers or clients. In addition to the English classes, North Carolina offers courses for international MBA students on American culture — from sports and entertainment to the origin of slang expressions — and on U.S. business communication, including practice exercises for impromptu speeches, team presentations, boardroom pitches and employee performance reviews.

“HEELS helps students achieve a standard to which they can aspire to improve their skills if they want to work in a specific U.S. industry,” said David Hofmann, MBA Program Associate Dean. “They can learn from the recruiters’ valuable feedback, and will no longer have to guess whether their language capability could hinder their ability to secure the types of jobs they want in the United States.”

Other schools are also expanding programs to help foreign students prepare for careers in the United States. The University of Rochester’s Simon Graduate School of Business, where nearly half of the MBA class is international, offers an English-language and U.S.-culture program that includes language instruction and trips to museums, theaters and sports events.

At the University at Buffalo, there are English as a Second Language classes, as well as opportunities for foreign nationals to practice pitching themselves to recruiters at mock career fairs and in interview workshops. “The average recruiter is going to decide in 30 seconds whether a student has the communication skills to make it in his organization,” says Paul Allaire, an assistant dean at Buffalo. “We want to give our international students a fighting chance to compete.”

For more on this story, read the Wall Street Journal’s “How Foreign Students Learn to Talk the Talk“.

Forbes.com recently posted their business school rankings with a twist - the payback. According to Forbes, their survey measures return on investment at 85 schools. They looked at the class of 1998 — “a class that worked through the boom and bust since graduation.”

The good news is that the class of 1998 is doing well. “The average 1998 grad almost tripled his or her pre-M.B.A. salary five years out of school, to $106,000. While annual income growth for the U.S. has sput-tered at 2.5% since 1998, for the B-school class of 1998 it has averaged 11% since graduation,” according to Forbes.

Harvard led the rankings “with a five-year gain of $149,000 over tuition and forgone salary. Its graduates saw their compensation jump 13% annually since graduation to $195,000 last year.”

Here are the top ten on the Forbes list:

Havard
Columbia
Chicago
Tuck
Yale
Wharton
Stanford
UNC
Kellogg
Darden

See the complete list here.

On March 14 The Economic Times, reported that banks are offering upwards of $180,000 to graduating MBAs. One Tuck student, a former NFL player, likened the aggressive behavior of recruiters to football players saying, “Once given the offer, you are getting anywhere from two to three to four phone calls a day.”

This competition between firms and rising starting pay is actually prompting schools like HBS, Kellogg, Wharton and Stanford to adjust the timing and amount of recruitment events. There were simply too many events for students. “‘We wanted to reduce the frenzied perceptions by some students [that] they had to attend all 15 events to show they were really interested in a company,’” according to a Wharton career services director. Companies are also getting creative about how they interacted with students — setting up chats at Starbucks, hosting events with student clubs or creating educational social events.

Firms are also going beyond the traditional perks of a signing bonus to offer stock-purchase plans. “‘It is a really good time to be an MBA,’ said Andy Chan, assistant dean and director of the MBA Career Management Center at Stanford.” The Dean at MIT’s Sloan attributes the boost in starting salaries and recruitment activities to basic supply and demand. The Dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck seconds that by saying, “‘I see the demand just going through the roof for this kind of talent.”‘

Read the entire article here.