A Study On Chinese Tourism Higher Education: Perspective Of Tourism Educators

An estimation from UNWTO shows that China will be the largest tourism destination worldwidely till 2015. Pressure from the increasing demand of the tourism industry is now driving China to be No.1 in terms of the quantity of tourism educational organization ranging from the basic tourism training college to high tourism insititutions(undergraduate, master and Ph.d). Tourism industry and tourism education actually functions as catalyst for each other's development respectively. China's tourism education is experiencing an tremenduous increasement from only 4 to 810 higher tourism institutions till the end of 2008.An enlarging size of tourism education does not automaticely grant creditability to an satisfying tourism education quality. Great attention is attached to the study of tourism education intentionally to find the way of quality improvement, mostly from the perspective of curriculum design and tourism discipline establishment rather than from the perspective of educator, the subjective initiator of tourism education. This thesis, taking the educator as research object, aims at describing the current situation of touism educator's structure based on the the descriptive analysis of the current situation of tourism inistitutions in mainland China. Questionairs are distributed to collected the data and multicorrespondent analysis is used to discuss the relationship between the educator's disciplinary structure and the program. as well as its relationship with the discipline family the program affiliated to.The main conclusions are:the tourism programmes can not mirror the demand of the market, but mainly stream from the regulations of MOE on the disciplines setting that. Descriptive analysis of educators shows that educational degree level is lower than that of other discipline. Most of the educators have degrees of management and only a tiny small portion(less than 7%) of educators have industrial practical experience over 3 years.A larger sample is needed to make the conclusion more verified and could be applied more widely. Due to the selection of dimension in the correspondence analysis of the variables, some parts of the information is missed thus the relationship between educators and disciplines affiliated and programs can not be explained 100%. Some other tools of quantitative analysis is advised to give a more easily understood image for this relationship. Some advises are proposed to improve the tourism higher education quality.