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Accepted applicants to top US b-schools have started behaving the same way in light of the current economic anxiousness as they did in the beginning of the 2008 economic crisis — they are deferring their admissions with all-too-familiar justification: “I’d rather be taking home a paycheck right now than shoulder a fat education loan.”

Reports Businessweek,

“At Southern Methodist Universitys Cox School of Business, a growing number of students seeking deferrals are citing financial hardship, opting to stay employed rather than attend B-school. At Harvard Business School, the first class of a program that admits new college graduates after two years in the workforce has been hit with dozens of deferral requests from students who have decided that the opportunities theyre in now are too good to pass up. At the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, admitted students are voting with their feet. Theyre not asking for deferrals, but turning the school down cold, in effect snubbing a top-ranked MBA program in favor of a steady paycheck.”

The risk of joining b-school in these times is compounded by skyrocketing tuitions at American b-schools. An article in Fortune proposes that MBA students in these b-schools are shouldering record levels of debt without the kind of caution one expects with big ticket loans.

But with fees and living expenses, the total ticket creeps dangerously close to $200,000: The Wharton School’s incoming MBAs will pay close to $178,000 to study and live in Philadelphia. If they continue to borrow at rates similar to their predecessors, the average 2013 graduate will rack up debt of nearly $124,000.

Schools have gotten away with steep tuition rises, but critics say these hikes are unsustainable, partially because students are borrowing too much to study. “We’re starting to get to a point of diminishing returns,” says Mark Kantrowitz, founder and publisher of FinAid, as well as FastWeb, a free scholarship matching service. “The pricing power of the colleges is going to hit a ceiling.”

There is some evidence that prospective MBA students are voting with their feet, taking their talents elsewhere or sticking with their current jobs. A recent Poets&Quants; report showed that applications to many B-schools will drop between 3% and 10% in 2011-12. The reason? Full-time MBA programs don’t offer the value they used to.

Ajit Balakrishnan, Rediff CEO and IIM Calcutta’s Chairman Board of Governors in a column in the Business Standard paints a grim future of higher education in India. Education is failing in teaching students how to connect the dots between different domains to arrive at innovative solutions to traditional and emerging problems, he argues.

Students seem to trip up when it comes to applying what they have learnt in one context to solve a similar problem in another context. Robert Haskell, professor of psychology at the University of New England, terms such a problem-solving skill transfer of learning. His book Transfer of Learning: Cognition, Instruction and Reasoning defines transfer of learning as the skill to detect that a problem is like or is equivalent to or is the same as or resembles or is comparable to some other problem that the student has encountered before. This kind of reasoning is evidence of the skills of mental abstraction, generalisation, induction and logical inference. These skills make up true education.

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Unfortunately, attempts to teach such transfer-of-learning skills by using the classic structured drills in the basics dont seem to do the job, nor do the efforts to do it by giving students unstructured free rein for self-discovery.

Ivy Cap Ventures, a venture capital fund created with the stated purpose of funding entrepreneurs from India’s top colleges — namely the IITs and IIMs — was in the news this week because it recruited the just-retired Home Secretary GK Pillai. The fund has been in the news before. “Unlike other venture funds, 5% of the fund’s profits will be ploughed back into the educational institutions chosen by the investors,” adds a news report.

The fund’s basis beats me. Will this fund pass up funding a great idea from a good team just because they don’t belong to a premier school? Past record of India’s entrepreneurial theater shows that premier Indian schools have no monopoly over either great ideas or companies. Okay, maybe IIT alumni have done great things but IIM graduates are known to be risk averse employees-in-making of banks and FMCG companies. And a fund’s job is not that of a motivational speaker’s — to wake students out of their safety slumber and get them to start game-changing (I too can, dear Rahul Gandhi) companies. VCs invest in and mentor promising ideas/companies in anticipation of a integer-multiple returns in the future, regardless of where the people come from. And entrepreneurs from IITs or IIMs ought to work as hard as a regular educated joe to get their first cheque-against-equity. Not because I have something against elite colleges, but because an affirmative-action fund skips important ground for an idea or a team to truly prove its caliber as worthwhile. These are some of the things I would like to understand about the Ivy Cap fund as it raises capital and starts funding.