Status of Hospitality Education in Nepal: Analysis of the Perspective of Hospitality Students and Practitioners

Surya Kiran Shrestha PhD Candidate Tribhuvan University, Nepal Abstract Hospitality Management Institutes have seen tremendous growth in the recent years in Nepal. More and more students have shown their inclination to pursue hospitality related courses from the institutes at national level or at different universities or from private institutes. However, the higher education system of this sector has encountered several constraints and challenges that led us to conduct this study to analyse the status of hospitality education in Nepal. The study employed a blend of qualitative and quantitative research method by delivering a descriptive approach as well as undergoing a simple empirical research. The respondents in this study were 180 final year students from bachelor level hotel management colleges and 10 human resource managers from large stale hotels. The study explored the views of students and hotel practitioners about the courses offered, mismatch of expectation, the skills the hospitality graduates possess and the challenges in retaining them in Nepalese industry. The study revealed the existence of mismatch between the expectation and reality from the bachelor in hotel management course. Further, the hotel practitioners also expressed Nepalese hospitality graduates are capable to take the entry level positions and lack the managerial capability to lead the departments and the organisations.


Introduction and Study Objectives
Hospitality industry refers to the service industry and is synonyms for the tourism industry. In the last two decades, tourism has been contributing 6% of world output, one in 15 jobs and 7% of capital investment. According to Kumar (2018), it can double its contribution to the world's output, increases jobs by 33% and capital investment can jump by 80%. Hospitality and tourism industry is the main source of the Nepalese economy contributing significantly to the GDP (Shrestha, 2020). The number of international tourists arrived in the country exceeded 1.1 million in 2018 and is predicted to be 2 million by 2020 (NTB, 2019). According to Nepal Rastra Bank (Central Bank of Nepal), the direct contribution of travel and tourism to GDP was NPR 99.8 billion, 4% of total GDP in 2017 and was forecasted to rise by 4.9% in 2018. The GDP contributed by the tourism industry in 2019 was NPR 195 billion. Nepal's travel and tourism industry is expected to create more than 1.35 million jobs directly and indirectly by 2029 (NRB, 2019). The data of tourist arrival has shown the changes between January and February of 2018 and 2019 as 25.4% and 39% respectively. With the growth of tourism, the hotels industry has also increased at the same rate. According to the Ministry of Tourism, the annualised growth of hotels and restaurants was close to 10% (MoCTCA, 2018).
In all these regards, the last two decades has seen an increasing sense of self-awareness and reflection regarding the current state and the future evolution of hospitality (Jameson, Walmsley, & Ball, 2006;Jones, 2004;Slattery, 2002;Lynch, Germann, Mclntosh, Lugosi, & Lashley, 2011). Some have adopted an optimistic position on the intellectual development of the field, acknowledging the growing engagement with other disciplines and subject areas, which has enabled hospitality to open new lines of enquiry and to export knowledge into other disciplines (Lashley, 2008;Morisson & O'Gorman, 2008).
The wide array of hospitality fields has contributed immensely to the growth of hospitality education (HEFCE, 1998). As an applied discipline, hospitality education has a close and strong linkage with its industry to educate hospitality students by keeping abreast with the current industry trends (Goodman & Sprague, 1991). A growing demand of hospitality workers can be translated into a growing demand of hospitality educational programs to adequately prepare the workforce to meet present and future demands in this enormous industry. As the hospitality industry is a service-oriented area, most of the hospitality programs put more weight on industry expectations and opinions.
Hospitality education must consider the expectations of the industry and student perception.
However, there is not common consensus regarding the status of hospitality management education from the perspectives of students and practitioners. Thus, the study has been directed towards understanding the status of hospitality graduates' perceptions about the 3 courses. The general objective of this study is to find out the status of existing bachelor of hotel management courses practiced by various institutions in Nepal and the perception of their graduates and employers on it. The specific objectives of this study are as follows: − To explore the perception of undergraduate hospitality students about the matching of their expectation from the courses offered and opportunities available for hospitality graduates at national and international level − To explore the perception of entrepreneurship intention of undergraduate hospitality students, and − To explore the opinions of hotel practitioners about the skills the hospitality graduates possess and the challenges in retaining them in Nepalese industry

Literature Review
In providing useful typology, Copper et al. (1994) have explained three ways by which the study of tourism and hospitality has developed as an academic subject. First it was through specific training related to the travel sector, afterwards courses in the business areas and later, on the study of tourism and hospitality was approached along with traditional subjects such as Geography, Sociology and Linguistics. The beginning of higher education in hospitality dates back to 1893 (Hsu et al., 2014). Copper et al. (1994) commented that tourism and hospitality is an emergent subject, and that tourism and hospitality education has grown significantly during the last 50 years, but its knowledge is fragmented. Likewise, Nepalese hospitality industry has been suffering the brain-drain of qualified and skilled personnel. The lucrative job prospects outside of Nepal that includes earning higher than what a relatively more qualified person in Nepal could earn and more opportunities for 4 talented employee's people abroad. Nepali companies neither would be able to provide such opportunities in Nepal, nor meet the expectation of the youth (New Business Age, 2018; Sthapit & Shrestha, 2018). From the practitioner's point of view, Nepalese hospitality management industry has several challenges such as low pay, less opportunity for employment, mismatch between classroom learning and workplace, shortage of manager levels human resources, retention of skilled human resources, undue political and trade union pressure (Shrestha, 2020).
Curriculum within tourism and hospitality management degrees provides an understanding of the vocational characteristics of curriculum. Acquiring skills and knowledge are considered an important task for vocationally orientated education (Marsh and Willis, 2007). The most common purpose of tourism and hospitality undergraduate programmes is to prepare students to work in the tourism and hospitality industry (Stuart-Hoyle, 2003). Even though this may be narrow in a technical functionalism approach, it fits the vocational nature of a hospitality and tourism curriculum. Airey and Tribe (2000)  However, the studies have shown some ambiguity regarding the expectancy from hospitality courses, opportunities available, hospitality entrepreneurship intention and the challenges in retaining hospitality graduates. Casado (1992) conducted a study on new and final year students and found that students who just joined the institute were having a very positive attitude toward the industry, but the final year students who were exposed to the industry were not having equally positive attitudes. Barron and Maxwell (1993) found that in general, the new students had a positive image of the industry, whereas the students with supervised work experience were having less-positive views. Emenheiser, Clayton and Tas (1997) found that most final year students were satisfied with their internship which strengthened their problem-solving ability in the hospitality industry, hence, they have a positive perception about the industry. Kusluvan and Kusluvan (2000) discovered that most of the hospitality students have no idea about the industry when they join the course and thus when they are exposed to the actual conditions in the industry, they get a negative attitude, and this contributes to the high turnover rate in the hospitality Industry. It implies that students' expectations will be realistic if they are informed about the real scenario of the hospitality industry, and thus they will prepare themselves to confront the upcoming conditions. Leslie & Richardson (2000) surveyed that student's pre-internship perceptions and post-internship experiences influence students to avoid careers in the hospitality/tourism industry. Jenkins (2001) in his study stated that work experience as a trainee in the industry affected senior students' perceptions in a negative way.
Collins (2002), and Lam and Ching (2007) found that poor or no stipend, poor employee relations, unorganised work environment, limited or no delegation, long working hours, and overall a hectic working environment faced by the final year graduates during internship are the most common factors that create dissatisfaction and decreased motivation toward industry and internship. Roney and Oztin (2007) highlighted that students' negative internship experiences resulted in the development of a less favourable perception of hospitality and tourism. Even when the students are having quite realistic expectations before and during their studies, still their turnover rate is high when they join the industry. Yafang and Gongyong (2008) emphasised that final year hospitality students who were exposed to real work conditions in hotels during their internship period develop negative perception toward industry due to lack of coordination between schools and employers', "opportunities for selfdevelopment," "pay and welfare," "work pressure," "opportunity for work rotation," "interesting and challenging work," and "autonomy involved in the work." Park and Kim (2011) have stated that the post-internship perceptions generally have lower mean values than pre-internship expectations for most career factors, thereby implying that final year students after internships become pessimistic regarding their future jobs. Kasli and IIban (2013) in their finding revealed that the final year students who have undergone training have developed a perception of trainees viewed as cheap labour in the hospitality industry and does not contribute to the professional development of them, and this makes the perception of the senior students negatively. Datta, Biswakarma and Nayak (2013) explained that there was a difference in expectation between senior students who had completed internships and juniors who were yet to undergo industrial training. The students who had completed their training had a more negative perspective towards the hotel industry.

Research Methods
The study has employed a blend of qualitative and quantitative research by delivering a descriptive approach as well as undergoing a simple empirical research. The study would be analysing the role of hospitality management education in producing employable candidates on one side and the other side to show, guide and motivate the students to accept a more challenging role as entrepreneur in emerging hospitality sectors. The research has been planned and executed in the primary way and the analysing data using primary source. The research has been conducted in two phases and based on them the issues are analysed. At first stage, the study collected the perception about the hospitality education and constraints encountered by the final year students (already undergone internship) of three colleges representing two universities. As per survey, 6000 graduates graduate from 55 institutions annually. A total of 180 students, 60 from each college were selected using a simple random sampling method in February-April 2020. In the second stage, 10 human resources managers from 10 large-scale hotels (4-5 star-hotels) were purposively selected as a sample to take the opinion about the skills the hotel management graduates possess. The data was analysed using Microsoft excel.    Similarly, Figure 5 reports the evidence of opinion of the hotel management students regarding the availability of job opportunities at international and national level. Around 74 % of the students agree that more job opportunities are available at international level as opposed to national level (See Annex 5). It is also the evidence of intention and the attraction of the students of joining the job at international level. Indeed, the demand for hospitality graduates in the international market is very high. Unfortunately, the hospitality entrepreneurship intention is very low among the hotel management students in Nepal. Figure 6 depicts that only 14.5 % students were ready to take the entrepreneurship initiation in the future and 83.3 % of the students were not with the intention of initiating the entrepreneurship activities (See Annex 6)

Results and Discussion
The study also intended to capture the opinion of the student's intention after completing their course in Nepal. Figure 7 exhibits the opinion on this regard. 56.7 % of the students have the intention to pursue higher studies either in Nepal or abroad. In overall, 61.7 % of the students have the intention to pursue higher studies abroad as opposed to 5% (See Annex 7), who intended to join universities in Nepal. Similarly, 40.6 % of the students opined their intention of joining the job market either in Nepal or abroad. In overall, 26.7 % students have the intention to join the job market at international level as opposed to 13.9 % who intended to join the Nepalese hospitality industry in Nepal. It is the evidence regarding the charm of foreign countries among the hotel management students in Nepal.

Conclusion
Hospitality management institutions have been mushrooming in the recent years in Nepal.
More and more graduates are produced by hospitality related institutions from national or international universities or institutes. However, the higher education system of this sector has encountered several constraints and challenges that led us to conduct these courses to analyse the future prospect of hospitality education at a higher level in Nepal. The study explored the views of students and hotel practitioners about the courses offered, mismatch of expectation, the skills the hospitality graduates possess and the challenges in retaining them in Nepalese industry. The study revealed the existence of mismatch between the theoretical and practical inputs at bachelor level of hotel management. Almost all students are not satisfied with industrial exposure and majorities have complaints regarding the exposure to a single department. Majority students have the intention to pursue higher education abroad after graduation. They agree that more job opportunities are available in the international market. Unfortunately, the hospitality entrepreneurship intention is very low among the hotel management students in Nepal. Although many universities' hotel management courses have the objectives of producing graduates for supervisory level, the hotel practitioners expressed Nepalese hotel management graduates are capable to take the entry level positions and lack the supervisory capability to supervise and manage the departments and the organisations.

Limitations of the Study and Suggestion for the Future Study:
The study was limited within the bachelor's degree of hotel management education offered by various universities in Nepal. It is highly recommended to conduct such kind of research in travel and tourism management at bachelor level education.

Funding
The author declares that he has received no funding or financial support in carrying out the research.

Conflict of interest
The author claims having no conflict of interest in the research work.

Annex 1
Matching of expectation from the course