The Importance Of Tourism Education

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Recently, universities are expected to play a new role in addition to research and teaching as active contributors to regional economic development (Alonso and María, 2013). Universities can contribute to entrepreneurship both indirectly, through Educating future innovators who represent a great responsibility for the universities to address the need for a more entrepreneurial workforce in general, and for highly qualified competence in this area , and directly through the research conducted at universities that constitutes a source of ideas and inventions with commercial potential that is not fully utilized at most institutions(Rodrı, Alonso, Andrada and Pedroche ,2013).This can be seen as recognition of the importance of entrepreneurship, …show more content…

Echtner points out that the existing types of tourism education programs can be grouped into two basic categories: professional education and vocational skills (McGehee, Kim and Jennings, 2007),
The main objective of professional education is to develop students’ ability to interpret, evaluate and analyze by providing theoretical concepts. The main objective of vocational education, on the other hand, is to teach skills; such content is highly practical. Although the debate on the content and approach to tourism education programs has centered on professional education versus vocational skills, they both are mainly concerned with creating human resources to work for others (Kinnaird and Hall, …show more content…

In the Bachelor curriculum of the tourism studies department students are provided with a combination of theory and practical assignments. Central focus is competencies. Courses are provided within the following fields: Business administration, planning, study of tourism legislation, economics, finance, marketing, financial accounting, they are trained on the practical skills needed in the tourism field (ticketing, customer service…etc). At the end of the program (fourth year), students are supposed to set a feasibility study for a hypothetical tourism project applying all the previously studied

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