Business degrees account for a vast section of the undergraduate and postgraduate higher education market. In its Business School Data Trends 2013 the AACSB International, the US-based accrediting body, estimates that as of last February there were 15,673 institutions worldwide offering business degrees at all levels.

But the question of whether many students are wasting their money on an irrelevant qualification is being more hotly debated than ever.

In the US, the gold standard MBA degree is thought to account for two-thirds of all graduate business degrees conferred in the US, according to research by Marina Murray of the Graduate Management Admission Council, which also found that one-fifth of all degree-granting institutions in the US offered an MBA.