Resumen de Considering specializations: an alternative for ranking hospitality and tourism graduate programs
Clark Hu, SooCheong Shawn Jang, Billy Bai
The rapid growth of the hospitality and tourism education has intensified a competition among national and international academic programs. Stakeholders in this competitive environment often seek benchmark information for their decisions to participate in the education system. Program/school rankings serve this purpose. However, the most popular and cited sources on such rankings as reported by Business Week and US News & World Report have not recognized hospitality and tourism disciplines in their annual ranking reports. Although some measures have been developed by academic researchers to assess the hospitality and tourism schools/programs, the results have raised much controversy. This paper suggests a need for better ranking systems and attempts to make further contributions in the context of the hospitality and tourism education. The purposes of this study were to (1) review past efforts of school ranking, (2) recommend an alternative approach to rank hospitality and tourism graduate programs by specializations, and (3) explore and suggest meaningful categories of ranking criteria for more effective ranking studies in the future.
