Star Search.

IN SCHOOLYARDS FROM HARVARD TO THE UNIVERSIDAD Catolica in Chile, masters of business administration strut across campus these days with a super swagger. As this month's cover story shows, students pick and choose between dot-coin dreams and business as usual at big multinationals dangling fatter starting salaries thanks to the competition for fine young entrepreneurs from the e-commerce crowd.

The cyber-siren song is noticeably stronger in the North than within Latin America, where locally trained MBAs seem more conservative--perhaps because they are less affluent--than their internationally educated colleagues who invest as much as US$100,000 in graduate education.

While click-and-order start-ups cull top talent from Stanford and other U.S. universities, bricks-and-mortar companies increasingly scoop the cream of the crop from the Latin American universities. This trend promises to bolster nascent business schools from Mexico City to Buenos Aires, where everything "e"--from entrepreneurship to e-commerce--inculcates curricula. Some institutions, like the Monterrey Institute of Technology, have embraced high-tech teaching with one of the world's largest distance learning programs via satellite.

Whether post-graduate studies are done at home, abroad or "abroad from home, a master's degree in business administration has never been more valuable. Just ask the corporate recruiters who are scouring campuses for new recruits.

Mike Zellner

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P.S. In this issue, we launch Trade Lanes, a new section tracking the people, companies and trends that are revolutionizing logistics in Latin America and beyond.