Comparative analysis of higher education in tourism in Latin America and Spain. Critical success factors and determinants of enrollment prices.

Abstract

GoalTo improve the understanding of higher education in hospitality and tourism in Latin America and Spain, the critical success factors and the determinants of the price of the educational programs.Objectives* To identify the current market supply on offer of graduate and postgraduate programs of hospitality and tourism studies in Latin America and Spain.* To ascertain the critical success factors perception gaps between academic managers, program directors, tourism students and students from other subjects.* To evaluate the price impact of the determinants of the prices of the hospitality and tourism academic programs.MethodologyIn order to reach the first objective, in 2014 we collected data from the Webs of the academic institutions, as well as from the e-mail and telephone contacts with the persons of these institutions. The information was grouped in seven groups for further analysis: (1) Geographical area; (2) Typology; (3) Academic factors; (4) Convenience factors; (5) Financial factors; (6) Employment promotion factors and (7) Promotion and recruitment factors.From the universe of academic institutions we identified 906 both public and private institutions offering graduate and postgraduate education on hospitality and tourism in Latin America and Spain. These institutions are located in 21 countries, covering 2,380 programs, from which 1,717 are graduate and 863 are postgraduate.In relation to the second objective, we sent an on-line questionnaire to all managers of the programs and a sample of students. The sample sizes were 348 and 202 responses respectively. The number of academic institutions delivering responses was 231. These data was analysed utilizing a confirmatory analysis to determine the critical success factors.In relation to the third objective of this research, the analysis is based on the price data obtained from 617 postgraduate programs, which represents a 71.5% of the total postgraduate programs investigated. The methodology is based on the hedonic price model, which is based on the hypothesis that the price of an education program can be successfully explained by a set of explanatory characteristics of the programs. The prices for different countries were converted by the Purchasing Power Parity (PPP) index to enable comparability. We identified a total of 24 potential explanatory variables which were grouped into different categories according to the empirical evidence and similar models to be found in the literature.ResultsThe dissertation consists of three research works. The first one analyses the differences among the type of programs (graduate or postgraduate), country and region (Latin America or Spain) across the seven typical aforementioned groups of factors that commonly characterize an academic hospitality and tourism program. Latin America shares the largest number of programs (71.6%) with 1,705 individual degrees on offer, while Spain shares 28.4% with 675 programs. However, the distribution is uneven across graduate and postgraduate types. In 2015, Latin America offered 1,370 graduate programs and 335 postgraduate programs, while in Spain it was offered 147 graduate programs and 528 postgraduate programs. Spain, Brazil and Mexico share the largest shares of the total supply of academic programs in hospitality and tourism, with 28.4%, 22.4% and 19.5% respectively. Altogether they represent a 70.3% of the total supply. These shares are followed by Argentina (7.5%), Peru (2.8%) and Colombia (2.6%).In relation to the academic factors, a 71% of the institutions offering academic programs are private institutions. In respect of the convenience factors, it is found that the online mode represents an 11.9% in Latin America and 36.2% in Spain. The academic areas with more programs are Tourism Management, Hospitality Food and Beverage in both regions. There is also a growing interest in the area of MICE, Tourism Marketing and Sustainability. …