When Christoph Kramer of Germany surveyed the field of universities offering undergraduate business programs, he focused on their locations as much as on their academic programs.

“China is always in the media; everyone says it is the future,” he said by telephone from Düsseldorf. So he enrolled in a three-year program at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, because he thought it would be a culturally enriching experience.

According to a recent study on graduate employability, Mr. Kramer’s H.K.U.S.T. degree puts him ahead of business graduates from many well-known Western universities.

The 2012 Global Employability Survey, which is being released exclusively in the International Herald Tribune, characterized the ideal young candidate on the basis of skills, personal qualities and the schools they attended. The study, a collaboration of Emerging, a French consulting firm, and Trendence, a German research institute specializing in recruitment, asked hundreds of companies what they looked for when hiring recent graduates, regardless of their course of study.