Business School Deferrals: Is there a game?

The link below takes you to a page that analyzes the situation with the decline in business schools granting admission deferrals. Is the game as simple as the schools not granting these deferrals because of the pool of students that will be accepted into the program in the following year? I think there is more to the game than just that. According to the article, the request for deferal can be blamed on the current economy and the cost of an MBA degree.

In the IT/OPs class that we are concurrently taking with SDA, we learnt that the goal of every business is to make money through the sale of the products an organization sells. In this case, the product that the organization is selling is an MBA degree from highly recognized business schools. If students keep requesting deferrals and keep getting them, they are depriving the school from funds that other students who were either on the wait list or were denied admission (because the spot was given to this student requesting a deferral) would have provided. The article also refers to students who are required to provide deferral deposits and to sign forms stating that they will not re-apply to any other programs. Those are strategic moves that these schools are making to secure the funding supply that business school admissions present.

Bottom line is that businesses will do what needs to get done to secure their financial standing amongst competitors. Now, maybe finding ways to increase the overall pie of the game could result in a parento efficient game whereby both the business schools and the students requesting admission deferrals will somehow, both earn the highest payoffs possible. How that level of cooperation will be attained is another topic entirely.

http://www.businessweek.com/bschools/content/dec2009/bs2009127_581931.htm