It was the kind of take-home lesson an M.B.A. student could not get in a classroom.

While he was in Soweto, South Africa, an economically challenged black township, Oliver Hahl, a student at the Yale School of Management, says he heard of people “squirreling away money in a mattress” and “using the money as soon as possible” to avoid falling prey to robbers.

During that same trip in January, Hahl learned of a possible entrepreneurial solution: The chief executive of Standard Bank, one of South Africa’s biggest financial institutions, described an A.T.M. powered by a battery—which would solve two major problems: Soweto’s unreliable electricity service and the nearest bank machine’s being about 12 miles away.

“It was impressive to see the vision that the bank’s leaders shared in South Africa,’’ Hahl, 29, says. “They understood that their business strategy could be linked profitably with society’s development.”

These international trips are becoming more common as Yale and other business schools including Stanford and Tulane, as well as M.I.T.’s Sloan Fellows Program in Innovation and Global Leadership, now require their M.B.A. candidates to travel abroad—a week or longer—to gain real-life experience in the new global economy. Students meet local business leaders, conduct presentations, and even work for short stints.

“There was a time when American corporations like General Motors, General Electric, and I.B.M. were reigning models for education,” says Doug Rae, the Yale School of Management professor whose committee created the new international-travel requirement for the M.B.A. curriculum, which was adopted last fall.

With globalization, the view that M.B.A. students need to study only American business no longer holds, he says. Most Yale M.B.A. graduates require international experience no matter what they do, whether it’s overseas dealmaking, marketing, or outsourcing, he notes.

Stanford’s revised M.B.A. curriculum, which debuts in September, will also include a global-experience requirement, says administrator Grace Yokoi, so students will “really understand what it means to be living in a global economy.”

Stanford M.B.A. hopefuls must embark on either a student-led study tour, a service-learning trip (meeting socially minded entrepreneurs), or a “global-management-immersion experience” (a four-week internship).

But what do students say they get out of these faraway field trips?

Brian Murphy, a graduate of Tulane’s M.B.A. program, says that his trip to China, where his classmates and their peers in Beijing exchanged ideas in both English and Chinese, “really put you in the shoes of an international consultant having to present ideas to business leaders from two different countries”—skills he will tap for his employer, KPMG, on international assignments.

Hahl says his travel to South Africa and Tanzania drew more attention from job recruiters “when they heard that it wasn’t the usual M.B.A. party trip.” The visit, he says, “made me more marketable because it reinforced my ability to deal with international settings.”

While M.B.A. candidates with the inclination to travel have for some time ventured abroad between semesters or spent a term in London or Paris, the new travel mandates are as varied as their destinations. At Stanford, student leaders volunteer to arrange the group excursions for approximately 30 of their peers, who get to pick from more than 15 destinations ranging from Australia to Sweden. At Yale, faculty design the trips, which offer a choice of eight foreign itineraries. While exposure to foreign C.E.O.’s speaking about their businesses is typical, the Yale trips go beyond that to provide on-the-scene demonstrations of economic trends, focusing on topical issues such as congestion pricing in London or ecotourism in Costa Rica.

This required M.B.A. travel may not be just an isolated experience but, instead, may be linked to or tapped in class. Stanford is offering a first-semester course, the Global Context of Management, to prepare students for their travels with a framework for “reading” a country’s business culture.