Status and prospect of tourism education in China

As a power of tourism, China has enjoyed a boom of tourism education during the past decades. This paper analyses the features of tourism education in China including the large scale, diversified school levels, various discipline background and courses, multi-elements of school-running patterns and so on. Meanwhile, the problems are summarized, mainly showed in the followings: (1) training-objective is vague and training-model is obsolete, (2) ideas of teaching are not innovated, (3) methods of teaching is not advanced and (4) status of graduate employment is not satisfying. Based on the analysis, some suggestions for tourism education development in China are discussed at last, such as establishing a complete tourism discipline system, expanding the research field of tourism education, deepening tourism education reform, strengthening the international cooperation and optimizing the education system. Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013