Looking for Work? Try the World.

By Paul Gray

During the palmy days of the high-rolling 1980s, some Harvard Business School M.B.A. candidates would march into commencement ceremonies waving dollar bills, graphically displaying what they thought their futures held. They have not been doing that in the entrenched and downsized '90s. Now they brandish miniature flags of foreign countries.

A telling and serious point stands behind such graduation high jinks. In growing numbers, students in U.S. colleges and professional schools are looking to go abroad. Such wanderlust among the young is nothing new, of course; travel has traditionally been a means of letting off steam after years of cramming for exams -- a chance to see some sights, live out some romantic fantasies and pick up a cosmopolitan patina before going home to the serious business of life. The difference these days is that young people are leaving the U.S. not for pleasure or the burnishing of their education but for the serious business of life.

Business schools, which closely monitor their graduates and where they find jobs, have been noticing some figures lately that suggest a quiet brain drain is under way. At Stanford, 14% of the class of '94 elected to seek jobs abroad, compared with 6% in 1989. Business schools across the country -- from UCLA to the University of Chicago to Harvard -- report similar numbers. These swelling percentages include foreign nationals returning home. But at New York University's Stern School of Business, the number of American students taking jobs overseas has jumped 20% this year compared with a year ago.

Interest in foreign experience is also surging among undergraduates. Student applications for the University of Michigan's overseas-study programs in 20 countries have shot up 70% in the past two years. At Duke, 9.2% of 1993's graduating seniors said they planned to work abroad, in contrast to 3.2% the year before. And plenty of people abroad have evidence that the young Americans are coming. In Buenos Aires, Martin Porcel, spokesman for the American Chamber of Commerce in Argentina, says that eight months ago, his office received about one resume a month from U.S. applicants. Now that figure is eight to 10, and many are looking for their first job. Some 19 Americans, many of them young graduates, arrive in Hong Kong every day to take up jobs, as against half that number a decade ago. This year the Japanese government's Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, which offers one-year contracts to foreigners to work with local municipalities or as assistant language teachers, attracted 4,100 U.S. applicants, up fourfold since 1989.

This nascent outward-bound movement even has its own magazine, Transitions Abroad, which for several years has been targeted at American college students who want to work overseas. Founder and editor Clayton Hubbs, 58, takes it for granted that campus hunger for foreign-job information is surging. "I would make a guess that the numbers of those going abroad have increased between 10% to 25% over the past five years," he says. "But what is more interesting to note is the areas that have emerged as the preferred destinations. In the past, Europe was the place students automatically gravitated to; now people are saying Europe is the past and the Third World is the future. More people are going abroad to work because there are no jobs here that are interesting."

That may be an overstatement, but it raises a good and potentially troubling question: Are young people venturing abroad out of entrepreneurial zeal or because they feel squeezed and stymied by the U.S. job market? Elder observers provide contradictory answers. Maury Hanigan runs a consulting firm that advises multinational companies on staffing strategy and conducts focus groups with college students across the country. She says the twentysomethings she listens to express frustration at "the logjam caused by baby boomers, so many of whom are ahead of them in management jobs and won't retire for another 20 years."

Others admit that U.S. job prospects are cramped, but then go on to make a virtue of necessity. "There are about 12 million students in colleges across the country, and this economy cannot absorb all of them," says Michael Kahan, a political science professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. He tells his students, all within a subway ride of Wall Street, to think globally if they can't find work at home. "Their skills could be put to better use in less developed places like Mexico and the former Soviet Union," Kahan argues. "If my students ask me where they should look for jobs, I say, 'Learn Spanish and go to Mexico. Try the unconventional. Don't just look in the New York Times for a job; look in the Economist."' And Kahan thinks worldwide career searches are likely to be commonplace in the future: "It is going to be a life choice, not a vacation or a lark like the Peace Corps, where the purpose was always to come back."

That may be easy for a tenured professor in New York City to say. But what of the young people who have actually expatriated and found jobs? How are they faring, and do they feel they jumped or were pushed?

They come in several categories, these American itinerants. Some have hired on with banks and consulting firms or the dwindling number of U.S. companies willing to post, and pay the expenses of, novices overseas. Some have gone to work directly for foreign businesses. Others originally went abroad for such conventional purposes as study, language teaching or subsidized social work and then found that their knowledge of English and of U.S. mores was a negotiable skill in the view of local employers. And a few set out, gimlet- eyed, to seize or create business opportunities in new markets.

They are principally congregating in three distinct areas: the Pacific Rim, including not only such thriving hubs as Tokyo and Hong Kong but China, / Vietnam and Cambodia as well; Latin America, especially Mexico, which, thanks to the passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement last year, has become a potentially major market for U.S. goods and expertise; and Eastern Europe and countries of the former Soviet Union, where capitalism is breaking out all over, often in unpredictable ways. "Only an entrepreneurial student is willing to walk into so unstructured an environment," says consultant Hanigan. "You have the cowboys going to Eastern Europe."

"It's the wild, wild East over here," says Mike Gerrity, 24, who has established his own consulting firm in Moscow to help multinationals set up offices in Russia. A 1992 graduate of the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, Gerrity had no plans to wind up in Moscow until he visited some classmates working there and decided to stay, since the job market back home looked discouraging. He has no regrets: "There are opportunities to be creative here in a way there aren't in the States, where there is an infrastructure and there are rules. It's also nice to have access to upper- level management, who wouldn't give you the time of day back home."

This note -- responsible duties early in a career -- is sounded again and again by young American expatriates. Nicolas Kazloff, 24, a journalism graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, originally traveled to South America "to look for meaning in life." What he eventually found was a job designing and editing a forthcoming English-language edition of the Colombian environmental magazine Ozono. "Now I have my own magazine," he says. "That would just be a dream if I had stayed in the U.S." Another sort of vision has come true for Leslie Short, 29, of New York City.

A dancer and choreographer, she moved to Japan two years ago, and now runs her own show: J Men's Tokyo, a Chippendale's-like establishment where American and British men strip to their G-strings in front of interested female audiences. "I don't think anyone in the States would have given me responsibility for everything," she says. "And I'm making more money here than I could at home."

There can be downsides to the expatriate life. Marianne Sullivan, 28, who received a master's in journalism and Eastern European politics from Columbia University last year, is co-director of a media training center in Tirana, Albania. "No one comes here for fun," she says.

"I live in a house with two other people where the water runs only three ) times a day." Yale graduate Kathleen Charlton, 29, has for the past year been managing director of Ashta International Inc., a privately owned consulting firm in Hanoi; she says she enjoys her life there except for the lack of "the usual stuff: I miss good movies, I miss good Mexican food, I miss bagels."

Whatever the deprivations, many of the expatriates seem inclined to stay put for a while, perhaps a lot longer. Mike Galetto, 23, a 1993 DePauw graduate and a free-lance journalist in Buenos Aires, professes to be "in no hurry" to return to the U.S.: "It seems that back home people my age either have no job or are in jobs they hate. So why not give it a shot here?" Larissa Donovan, 25, graduated from Northwestern in 1991 and moved to China in search of a career. She is now a trade representative in Beijing and considers herself an "expat forever." She explains, saying, "Here the changes are so great. Home looks the same every time I go there." Jameson Firestone, 27, has established his own law firm in Moscow and can't imagine going back to a less hectic legal career in the U.S.: "Here the work is like being a doctor in an emergency room -- everything is critical." When he does ponder life after Moscow, Firestone looks for the exotic rather than the homegrown: "Jakarta, maybe. I hear that's a pretty interesting place."

More and more Americans are discovering that faraway places can yield up challenging occupations. Gregory Piccininno, 29, a New Jersey native and a graduate of the London Business School, found himself drawn to what he calls the "savage capitalism" of Brazil. He works for a Brazilian financial firm in Rio de Janeiro, socializes mostly with local friends, with whom he speaks Portuguese, and has no plans to leave anytime soon. "As a non-Brazilian, I get a lot of respect, if for nothing else than my abilities in English," he says.

Shouldn't the temporary or perhaps permanent loss of such ambitious and energetic talents be a cause of concern? Is the U.S. in danger of becoming in a possible future some weird, post-cold war colony, exporting its raw and not- so-raw material -- its educated young people -- and not even getting paid in return?

Business leaders and academics who have been charting this development think not. "It is not a brain drain but an enhancement of the brain power of the U.S.," says William Glavin, a former vice chairman of Xerox and now the president of Babson College in Wellesley, outside Boston. Glavin believes the new expatriates are receiving -- and will return with -- invaluable training they cannot now get at home: "A major problem in corporate America is a lack of global management knowledge. They are not going to learn much from managers in the U.S." William Hasler, dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, makes a related point. He finds the current outflux of young business people "very positive, because most of these people will end up working for American companies and will be able to make those companies more successful and globalized." Even those who don't return, Hasler argues, will benefit American businesses by providing advice to their foreign employers on how to deal most productively and profitably in the U.S.

Such optimism is comforting and, in a global perspective, almost certainly correct. National boundaries become ever less important in the world's economies; a job is a job, whether it be in Budapest, Buenos Aires or Birmingham, Alabama. Still, certain ancient human emotions have not yet adapted to the new realities. Some of the new expatriates tell of encountering resistance from their parents. When Rob Swift, 23, graduated from Stanford last year with a degree in international relations and announced that he had found a job in India, his mother offered to pay him to stay behind. And it's a safe bet that some of those spectators watching their offspring collect Harvard M.B.A.s wish the kids were still waving dollar bills and anticipating careers closer to home.

With reporting by John Colmey/Hong Kong, Sally B. Donnelly/Moscow, Stacy Perman and Sribala Subramanian/New York