Every era has its own version of an MBA’s dream. In the 1980s, it was about conquering Wall Street, the late 1990s saw a run to Silicon Valley. After the millennium parties, private equity companies seemed to be irresistible. Now, it’s all about Asia and its promise of growth.

At premiere institutions such as the University of Chicago's Booth School, the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, and Northwestern's Kellogg, the percentage of MBAs taking jobs in Asia has more than doubled in the past five years, from roughly 5 per cent of the graduating class to more than 10 per cent.

For many MBAs, the prospect of making a bigger impact faster is simply too good to pass up, especially now that the pay packages offered by both domestic and multinational companies are competitive with those in the United States. China is seen at the new wild west, not only by Anglo-Saxons but also by many Chinese who emigrated to America when they were young. They find themselves breaking the news to their families that they're chasing the same dream that lured their parents to the U.S. - only in reverse. Then there are the international students, who until recently would likely have stayed in the U.S. to learn the soft skills of Western management, but are now heading straight back home. On Facebook, Twitter, and Skype, MBAs swap stories about the adrenaline rush of working in an emerging market and the joys of geographic arbitrage.

It was once rare for Asian companies to come to American B-school campuses for the recruiting season. Now at Wharton, Chinese firms such as heavyweight investment bank China Investment Corp and IT firm Ten cent are showing up. This year, CICC presented to standing-room-only crowds. At Kellogg, India-based Infosys and Tata Group are now on hand for recruiting. The University of Chicago's Booth School is seeing so much interest from Chinese companies that it recently opened a career services office in Hong Kong .

South Korea's Samsung Electronics last year signed 50 non-Korean MBAs from the top 10 business schools in the U.S, double the number in 2008. Those 50 were in addition to the dozens of ethnic Koreans that Samsung scooped up from MBA programs in America. At Kellogg, Samsung hired 16 business school graduates alone—more than U.S.-based hiring stalwarts General Mills and Procter & Gamble combined. The new hires work in Samsung's Global Strategy Group, which does all of its business in English, advising top Samsung executives on internal consulting projects. This year the company is on track to again double its hiring of U.S.-born MBAs.

Multinationals like Citibank, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Nike China are also broadening their international programs and ramping up hiring for their Asia divisions. Last fall a phalanx of high-level IBM’ers hit premiere B-schools to talk up IBM's new five-year boot camp for its general manager program. It gives the new hires massive international exposure, especially in places like Asia.

The Asian allure already creates rising concern about what the migration might mean for America's competitive edge. Two-thirds of Silicon Valley companies were started by non-U.S. Citizens. What if, after Stanford, Google's co-founder Sergey Brin had returned to his birth country of Russia ? “The best and the brightest are leaving,” says Professor Florida. “As a country, the U.S. has never been confronted with this before.”