And at Yale, for example, Hahl was asked to draw upon his Africa trip in a subsequent Innovator class, a part of the new core curriculum that focuses on how managers generate fresh ideas, services, and products. He had to recall something striking from his trip and apply it to another context.

“Try to pinpoint exactly what makes it novel,” the assignment requested. “Can you leverage it for a creative business, cultural, or socially responsible idea?”

Because Hahl had also worked in Brazil, he suggested that battery-powered A.T.M.’s would benefit the favelas, or shantytowns, of big cities like Rio de Janeiro.

At Stanford, students will also draw on their shared travel experiences in subsequent classes and when formulating career options, Yokoi expects, adding that one goal is gaining experience in interacting with businesspeople of different cultures—even in asking them tough questions.

Tulane’s M.B.A. travel requirement, perhaps the most extensive, comes with direct curricular tie-ins—before and during. (The silver lining to Hurricane Katrina’s storm cloud is that the 2005 shutdown of the New Orleans campus gave administrators time to revise the curriculum.) Tulane now mandates three international trips, each following a semester-long course on a region: a visit to Monterrey, Mexico, after Latin American study; a Paris excursion after a course on Europe; and an expedition to Beijing following an Asia course. (This fall, Tulane kicks off another specialized international-M.B.A. program requiring more travel: trips to six foreign countries and study at three universities abroad.)

In Mexico and France, Tulane students meet their counterparts, who have been working on similar cases. In Beijing, Chinese university students join the Tulane crowd. All participate in three-hour “case competitions” (solving hypothetical scenarios) with presentations required in Chinese and English. Those not fluent in Chinese must make other arrangements, relinquishing control to a Chinese speaker.

“It does give the monolingual person a sense of disadvantage,” says Bill Sandefer, director of admissions at Tulane’s Freeman School of Business, and a chance to “see the advantage that students who spoke Chinese and English had.”

A firm believer in field-based learning as a requirement for M.B.A.’s, Professor Yasheng Huang of M.I.T. says, “A huge challenge, however, is to avoid doing superficial tourism” and maintain intellectual rigor. Huang has led some of the trips the Sloan fellows must take—to strategic global-business regions to meet with top managers, typically at Western or large domestic firms—but he also designs a trek of his own, taking regular M.B.A. students (who are not required to travel) to Yunnan Province, one of China’s poorest regions. This “in-depth exploration of the real economic and social issues of China” visits startups in low-tech sectors, he says. “Firmly rooted in the home economies,” these firms “matter far more to the welfare of the people in developing countries” and employ locals without much education, he adds. Such trips reveal “how businesses can help reduce poverty [and] entrepreneurs can navigate the complicated bureaucratic system to get financing.”

Yokoi of Stanford says, “We can talk about differences in management styles in Asia and the U.S. all you want in the classroom. But not until you go there and learn from practitioners—experience it firsthand—[do you] really start to understand.”