CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS &S212; June of next year will be a big month for Nabeel Siddiqui, a 29-year-old from India studying at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. That is when Mr. Siddiqui, a former software-design project manager for Alcatel-Lucent, expects to receive two diplomas almost simultaneously.

One will be a master&S217;s of science in management studies from M.I.T.&S217;s Sloan School of Management, the other a master&S217;s of business administration from the &>01;cole des Hautes &>01;tudes Commerciales in Paris.

Mr. Siddiqi is one of 16 international students taking part in a new dual-degree program in which Sloan collaborates with foreign business schools. The students are piggybacking on their first year of M.B.A. studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing, Sungkyunkwan University in Seoul or HEC, as it is known, in Paris as a prelude to the master&S217;s program at Sloan. The credits the students earn there will fulfill their second-year M.B.A. requirements at the schools in China, South Korea and France.

With his credentials burnished, Mr. Siddiqui is now seeking an upward bound job with a major international corporation. He said, &S220;I don&S217;t have any inhibitions to go to any country and start working for a business. I don&S217;t have to think twice about it.&S221;

The introduction this year of the dual-degree program that brought Mr. Siddiqui to Sloan exemplifies a trend among business schools to bulk up their international offerings for students pursuing an M.B.A. full time. The schools have entered a &S220;period of experimentation&S221; to strengthen the international elements of their M.B.A. programs in light of the demand for graduates who can &S220;manage across national boundaries with a fluidity that just wasn&S217;t necessary a few years ago,&S221; said Garth Saloner, dean of Stanford University&S217;s Graduate School of Business.

By injecting more globalism into their subject matter and outlook, the schools are creating more opportunities for students to work for international companies, administrators say. For the schools, that has been a boon for recruiting &S220;more talented and diverse&S221; students, said J.J. Cutler, director of admissions and financial aid at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.

Revamping curriculums to add more international heft to courses has been one widespread strategy embraced by the schools. Last year, the J.L. Kellogg Graduate School of Management at Northwestern University began requiring every M.B.A. student to complete at least one of its international courses.

&S220;The students were ahead of us on this: 75 percent or 80 percent of students were doing this on their own,&S221; said Sunil Chopra, interim dean at Kellogg.

In 2007, Stanford introduced a new course, &S220;Global Context of Management,&S221; as a first-year M.B.A. requirement. Another innovation adopted that year required students to go on Stanford-sponsored two-week study trips to foreign countries or acquire equivalent international exposure to countries where they had neither lived nor worked.

&S220;Global immersion&S221; has become a catchphrase in business school vocabulary. Many schools employ that language to describe courses that combine international study with a week or two of travel to a foreign country or region for meetings with business leaders, government officials and the like.

The popularity of the global immersion courses, which cost students between $2,000 and $4,000 on top of typical tuition of more than $50,000 a year, is on the upswing. The global immersion program introduced last spring at the Columbia University Graduate School of Business drew 78 participants among the school&S217;s 1,400 M online payday loans.B.A. students in the first year. As the capstone to an elective course, students investigated matters like the carbon market in Brazil and the potential of investment partners in China.

This year, Columbia expects that 108 students will enroll in a global immersion course, according to Ethan Hanabury, the senior associate dean for business degree programs at Columbia. The purpose is to &S220;integrate&S221; a classroom experience and a study trip so as to make the academic material &S220;relevant to what&S217;s happening&S221; in the global business world, Mr. Hanabury said.

The desire to impart an international flavor to an M.B.A. is not new. Some schools began promoting an international perspective decades ago. At Harvard Business School, a course titled &S220;Business, Government and the International Economy,&S221; in which first-year students study the conditions in which global businesses operate, has been an M.B.A. requirement since 1978.

Still, if recognition of the value of a global component in business education is not new, it is increasingly widespread. Andrew Policano, dean of the Paul Merage School of Business at the University of California, Irvine, proudly summed up the extent of international cases in his M.B.A. program: &S220;Today, it&S217;s throughout our curriculum. We assess how it&S217;s going, but we don&S217;t have to worry anymore whether everyone is getting an international education.&S221;

Mr. Policano noted that, though Merage may not be as well-known abroad as larger and more prestigious schools, it nonetheless attracts about 70 of its 200 M.B.A. students from other countries.

A number of leading business schools in Europe have been ahead of U.S. schools in tilting toward an international orientation. Founded in 1958, the Escuela Superior de Administraci&>43;n y Direcci&>43;n de Empresas, or Esade, based in Barcelona, taught M.B.A. courses in Spanish for its first 42 years, and its students were predominantly from Spain.

But in 2000, the school&S217;s survey of the recruiting preferences of European companies pointed to a growing demand for internationally trained graduates. In response, Esade switched to English as the predominant language in its classes and sought students from many countries. Forty-seven nationalities are now represented among its 400 full-time M.B.A. students, 85 percent of them from countries other than Spain, said Gloria Batllori, the school&S217;s M.B.A. dean.

Rather than concentrate all its international students at its home campus in Fountainebleau, France, Insead, the international business school outside Paris, created a second campus in Singapore nine years ago. Though more of its M.B.A. candidates begin their studies at Fountainebleau than in Singapore, 80 percent of its 900 full-time M.B.A. students take courses at one time or another on both campuses, said Insead&S217;s dean, Frank Brown.

Some business school administrators caution, however, that investing in a foreign location can drain resources better spent on home campuses. Alan White, Sloan&S217;s senior associate dean, says his school has steered clear of large overseas investments, preferring instead collaborative arrangements like the one in which Mr. Siddiqui is participating.

For Mr. Siddiqui, however, the Sloan-HEC collaboration will mean an unusual expense. To collect the diplomas he expects from the two schools next spring, he plans to attend commencement ceremonies at campuses on two continents.

Special Report: International education: Giving Business Education a Global Twist

NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. economy may have turned a corner after the deepest recession in some 70 years, but Federal Reserve policymakers appear to be in no rush to raise interest rates.

The Fed is widely expected to keep its benchmark interest rate where it has been since December -- near zero -- when it meets this week.

With underlying inflation pressures actually decreasing and most Fed officials expecting the recovery to be slow, there is little incentive for the Fed to change its easy money policy.

"Anybody who expects major changes to the Fed&&9;s statement is likely to be disappointed," said Stephen Stanley, U.S. economist at RBS.

Fed officials, who meet on Tuesday and Wednesday, could discuss how they will prepare markets for an eventual policy shift, but analysts say it is too soon for the Fed to even hint toward an exit by tweaking its pledge to keep rates extraordinarily low for an "extended period."

Even as the U.S. economy appears to be still in need of Fed support, the repercussions of emergency monetary policies are being felt around the world.

Brazil has acted to stem the flood of speculative capital to its economy by adopting a 2 percent tax on foreign investment. Other nations have begun to intervene to keep their currencies from rising too sharply against the falling dollar.

Among top Fed officials a debate has broken out about how soon the central bank will need to act to nip inflation in the bud, although none are advocating a move now.

Financial markets will comb through the central bank&&9;s policy statement, which will be released at around 2:15 p.m. EST (1915 GMT) on Wednesday, for any clues on when the easy money period will start drawing to a close.

Most analysts at top U.S. banks expect the Fed&&9;s policy-setting Federal Open Market Committee to keep interest rates on hold until mid-2010 or later, though interest-rate futures markets are pricing in an increase earlier in 2010.

The most significant outcomes of the Fed&&9;s last two policy meetings concerned the central bank&&9;s purchases of U.S. government and mortgage-related debt. The Fed stopped buying longer-term Treasury debt last week, while the mortgage-related asset purchase program has been extended into early 2010 to provide for an orderly wind down no fax payday loans.

"Things are going to start to get interesting in 2010, but for the moment they&&9;ve got all their ducks in a row," Stanley said.

GROWTH HAS ARRIVED, BUT JOBS HAVE NOT

The Fed will note that the economy grew in the third quarter, snapping a deep four-quarter plunge and likely ending the U.S. recession. The officials are also likely to repeat there is still enough slack in the economy for inflation not to be an immediate worry.

Last week, data showed U.S. GDP rebounded at a solid 3.5 percent annual pace in the third quarter. A separate report showed inflation, outside of food and energy costs, bumping along at a eight-year low.

The outlook remains uncertain. Much of the third-quarter growth was pinned to government stimulus programs, such as the auto-buying incentives of the "cash for clunkers" program.

U.S. consumers, usually the main driver of activity, are wary. One report on Friday showed consumer spending fell in September for the first time in five months, while another showed consumer sentiment moved lower this month.

The job market also remains a worry. On Friday, the Labor Department&&9;s employment report is expected to show the unemployment rate hit a new 26-year high of 9.9 percent in October.

"What&&9;s transpired since the last meeting is a quarter of positive GDP growth, but I don&&9;t think the projections have changed much going forward and today&&9;s consumer confidence news was not particularly upbeat," Mark Gertler, an economics professor at New York University, said on Friday.

"So all in all, my guess is that the Fed is in a holding pattern right now."

If the Fed were to tweak its "extended period" statement next week, markets would aggressively price in a much swifter policy shift, analysts at Barclays said.

"We do not expect the Fed to want to bring that about until it is more certain it will need to tighten relatively soon," Barclays analysts wrote in a note to clients.

(Editing by Kenneth Barry and Maureen Bavdek)

Fed seen on hold as outlook uncertain