Management education represents an important segment of American college and university higher education courses, taken both for credit towards a degree or for management use. So important is this type of education that, of the more than half a million students currently graduating from colleges and universities in the United States, approximately one out of every eight is receiving his bachelor's degree in business administration (the term typically used for a specialization in one of the areas of business management). This popularity is not restricted to the undergraduate level, for one in ten graduate degrees is an MBA (master of business administration), totalling over 13 000 degrees, according to the latest available figures. This number is expected to climb both numerically and proportionally in the coming years.