Tourism education at the tertiary level in Indonesia: an exploratory study

[Extract] In addition to being the third major earner of foreign exchange (Rahardjo, 1998), another primary contribution from tourism in Indonesia is its capacity to generate employment, especially in the accommodation sector. As a result, the demand for technical and operational expertise remains great and offers many labour opportunities. This leads to a rapid development of tourism educational institutions to fulfill training needs. However, the rapid development in both numbers of institutions and the variety of programs has not been followed by an advancement on quality and research. Therefore, several matters warrant attention and consideration. For example, the development of an appropriate curriculum, the issues of standardisation, the development of tourism studies, and the tourism education-industry interface have not been researched extensively. Consequently, information available on tourism education in Indonesia is relatively inadequate