An analysis of postgraduate tourism education in Turkey.

Metin Kozak1* and Nazmi Kozak2IntroductionUntil the 1980s, the subject of tourism education was on the agenda of the international community, especially of developed countries such as the USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, etc. Not surprisingly, all these countries are in the category of English-speaking countries and therefore had close ties with the USA and the UK. Commencing from the mid-1980s, this list was augmented by the inclusion of other countries that entered into the tourism industry as European destinations, e.g. Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Turkey. The beginning of the new millennium has led to attention also being paid to the development of tourism education as well as tourism research in far-eastern territories, e.g. Malaysia, Hong Kong, China, Taiwan, and Thailand. In some countries such as Turkey, compared to their status in the 1980s, the number of tourism schools and their students has grown more than ten times, subsequently stimulating the number of postgraduate departments.While vocational colleges for tourism aim to meet the needs of the qualified workforce, higher education institutions try to educate the future department or business managers (Zehrer & Mossenlechner, 2009; Costa, Carvalho, Cacador & Breda, 2012; Luka, Vaidesvarans, & Vinklere, 2013). A further group of schools operates in the form of undergraduate programs under different names. In addition, a department for postgraduate degrees such as Masters and Ph.D. has been established in order to supervise the future of faculty members in academia as well as professional leaders in the industry (Harland & Plangger, 2004). In this context, such programs have developed their own curricula to include theoretical and practical courses, as well as foreign language learning. Because qualitative development still appears to be considered inadequate in closing the gap of service quality, and customer expectations have undergone rapid changes, both the industry and academia are now expected to initiate a debate about the quality of tourism education in these respects.So, how can the training of prospective managers be made more important, enabling them to pay attention to the dynamics of the tourism industry, to be knowledgeable about its practices, and to successfully manage such a business? Or, how can the education of competent academicians be made essential, producing academics able to analyze emerging formations and processes, and creating a new academic structure able to produce new knowledge? Or, how can greater emphasis be placed on developing an integrated model that pays equal attention to both scientific and professional aspects? Finding a proper set of answers in response to such questions is of great importance in unifying the different objectives of the above-mentioned schools and faculties.This study aims to present an in-depth analysis of the conclusions reached in the for postgraduate tourism education, held in Turkey, on the 22nd-25th April 2010. The conference was organised to develop a roadmap for the future of postgraduate tourism education, not only in Turkey, but also at the international level. Through the inquiries carried out under the lead of a facilitator, and the implementation of a SWOT analysis to find answers as to the question of how the system of postgraduate tourism education should be designed, the study provides various practical implications.MethodologyThe idea of organizing this was to influence the shaping of future meetings as well as common-sense-formation meetings, and was based on group work, employing a participatory planning methodology that aimed to create a common mind to assess the current situation of different issues and to develop strategies for the future. The search conference, created by the scholar Fred Emery, is based on systems thinking and the theory of group dynamics, and over the past twenty years its practical application has widened to encompass its use by many institutions to deal with a large number of problems in many countries such as America, Canada, Australia, England, and Norway (Emery, 1969). …

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