The number of people taking the admission test for graduate business schools in the United States has risen for the first time since the late 1980s.

Educators say the strong economic outlook is behind the upturn. But they also credit an exploding interest in entrepreneurship and anxiety about having enough credentials to protect against layoffs.

"I'm one of the downsizing-type people," said Stephanie Jones, who entered the University of Michigan Business School this autumn to get a masters in business administration. "I've seen periods where a lot of people are laid off and other people are hired. You've got to have a general management background, and that's what an MBA is."

A new evening graduate programme in business administration at Washington University in Washington State got 1,800 inquiries and 200 applications for just 45 places, said director Jim Danko.

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"People are a little more confident that if they leave the job market for a couple of years, they'll still be able to get back into it."

Nationally, 80 per cent of 121 business schools surveyed by the Graduate Management Admission Council reported an increase in applications this autumn. One in four said they had at least 20 per cent more applicants than last year.

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Don Marden, admissions director at the University of Chicago Business School, which had a 10 per cent increase in applications this year, says that many people feel that employers are beginning to expect advanced degrees.

"Without some credentials, they believe they may be at a competitive disadvantage" in the job market, Mr Marden said.

Mr Danko said MBA recipients are getting three times as many job offers from recruiters as did those who graduated in the early 1990s.

"Nowadays an undergraduate education isn't enough for the top financial institutions," said Anthony Riggio, 25, who left his job at the international accounting firm of Coopers & Lybrand to enter the University of Michigan Business School. "I felt I needed the MBA to advance."

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The number of people who have registered for the Graduate Management Admission Test required to enrol in business schools rose nearly 8 per cent this year after four years of flat growth or decline. But it is still about 16 per cent below its 1990 peak of 304,334 students.

The increase follows a period when the masters in business administration plunged from public favour. "In the late 1980s, everybody was thinking about making more money than God," said Ms Jones, 28. "They thought, let's get the MBA and get on that management track and make millions of dollars a year."

Then the economy soured in the early 1990s and scandals were exposed involving Wall Street brokers trained at fancy business schools. Michael Levine, a 26-year-old from New York at the Haas School of Business at the University of California in Berkeley, said: "People were coming down a lot on the degree and feeling it had gone out of date."

The school has seen a 72 per cent increase in applications for its MBA programme in the past two years and had 15 applicants for each place.

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Now even people who have graduated from advanced programmes in other fields are crowding into business schools. Twenty-one per cent of the MBA candidates at the University of Chicago, for example, already have other graduate degrees.

"It seemed like a good time to go," said Margaret Britt, 34, who has an engineering masters and has been a software engineer at AT&T for 12 years.

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Companies like hers are retooling, Ms Britt said, "going into the business end seemed like a good way of retooling myself."