“Go skiing in the morning and scuba diving in the evening... Be sure to pack your fancy clothes for the parties!”

If you thought this was marketing spiel for a luxe vacation spot, you couldn’t be farther from the truth. On a sunny February afternoon recently, this was Sudha Kumar, a recruitment coordinator in India for the University of Southern California (USC), hardselling the charms of the top-ranking school in downtown Los Angeles to a conference room packed with engineering students at Bangalore’s leading PES Institute of Technology.

Although more Indian students go to USC than any other college in the US, in these days of a global economic slump, the affable, helpful Kumar has her job cut out.

The US has been the study destination of choice for Indian students with close to 100,000 of them headed there last year. For long, an American degree followed by a job in the US has been the focal point of many a middle-class Indian dream, a dream that has been alternately termed ‘brain gain’ in the US and ‘brain drain’ here.

But, as the deadline for this year’s fall admissions approach, things look uncertain for thousands of bright Indian students coveting a US engineering degree or an MBA.

A brutal US job market, rising cost of education because of the declining rupee, and the drying up of student loans by banks and financial aid by US universities is making many Indian graduates, including those from PESIT, skip the visa lines at the American embassy this year.

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