Higher education chronicle

Airports to aeroplanes, luxury cruise liners to riverboat restaurants, universities to schools, railway stations to express trains, takeaways to top restaurants, city centre hotels to bed and breakfast. Wherever we are, whether in a department store, leisure centre or pub, or simply strolling in the park, there is normally a hospitality enterprise providing for our accommodation and dining needs.

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Indeed, there are hundreds of thousands of them in the UK alone, with a combined turnover of around 10% of the country's total consumer expenditure. This is very serious money; over £50 billion pounds!

The hospitality industry (loosely defined as hotels and a myriad of leisure and catering operations of different kinds) accounting for 70% of employment in the wider tourism industry offers unparalleled opportunities for truly international management careers.

These excellent job prospects are reflected in the demand for graduates.

For example, the Colchester Institute, like many of the UK's other established providers in hospitality management education, consistently achieve one hundred percent graduate employment.

What interests many prospective students is the extraordinary range of management jobs available. For example, in addition to operational management, graduates can pursue careers in such areas as personnel, marketing, sales, finance, training, facilities management, conference management and purchasing. Also, career progression is often rapid, with companies offering very good financial and development packages in recognition that there is a major shortage of well qualified management graduates for what is one of the world's largest and fastest growing industries.

Clearly, the hospitality industry offers excellent opportunities for ambitious graduates. In addition to management positions, self-employment is also a real possibility for experienced managers.


What has been stated thus far is justifiably upbeat, but it is also necessary to sound a note of caution. In order to succeed in this industry, it is useful to possess good interpersonal skills, and advancement will often fall to those that take on extra responsibility, and work under pressure. Also, in some sectors managers need to cope with working unsocial hours. Therefore, as with any other vocation, it is necessary to consider carefully the pluses and the minuses. Although, the extraordinary variety of opportunity means that most managers find they are in fact rather spoilt for choice.

Tips on Choosing a Course

There are a large number of centres offering Higher National Diplomas (HNDs) and degrees in hospitality management. Prospective students should try to get an idea from the college or university as to the number of years it has been running hospitality higher education programmes. For example, established centres, because of their long experience in the field, offer excellent resources and learning opportunities.

Industrial Placements.

Many employers are attracted to graduates that have gained work experience whilst on their course. Established colleges and universities will normally arrange these placements for the students, but the level of support varies, and it is worth asking some searching questions about this before choosing your place of study. The range of placements is also an important consideration.

For example, some centres, such as the Colchester Institute, provide a complete package where students can choose from a range of establishments throughout the USA, continental Europe and the UK. This particular package includes finding a mutually acceptable placement, arranging accommodation and negotiating the salary. All the students have to do is turn up for work! It is important, therefore, that you establish whether the centre offers such high levels of support, which should also include a visit by a lecturer, or industrial placement tutor. Whether they are in New York State or Scotland, our own students benefit equally from these visits, which, whilst being primarily for educational purposes, also help to reduce the occasional and inevitable problems a student may experience when working away from home for the first time.

Choice of Programme

Those wishing to study full-time choose between an HND or a degree. HND programmes are often two or three years in duration, and an honours degree will take up to four years to complete. The HND will usually have a six month work experience placement, and of the four year degree course, one year will be spent at work.

It is important to establish with the centre that one can progress easily from the HND to the degree. For example, some of our students prefer to do an HND (two years) and then ‘top-up' to a degree (a further one or two years). Another thing to look into is the range of degree titles on offer.

Programmes are often developed to allow students to choose a particular specialism to study in addition to the hospitality core. Specialism pathways include such areas as: Leisure, Conference Management, Marketing, Facilities Management, Business Studies, Tourism and Human Resource Management. The strength of this system allows graduates not only to gain specialist knowledge of a particular branch of management, but also to be able to convey this expertise clearly to prospective employers.

If deciding on a career in hospitality management, you can be assured of an interesting career with excellent opportunities for advancement, and for those that want it, the ability to have a truly international career. More and more, however, employers are seeking well qualified people to fill their management positions. It is necessary, therefore, to choose a higher education course that, reflects the particular branches of the industry that you wish to follow.

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Do We Really Need The Federal Education Department and The Department Of Energy?

The origin of this article comes from a short blurb in the December 17, 2010 issue of The Week magazine. The latest survey of student school achievement, which is done every three years by the Organization For Economic Cooperation and Development, found that students in Shanghai ranked first in the world in reading, science, and math. Quite a feat, to be number one in all three. The survey measured the education proficiency of fifteen year olds in 60 countries around the world.

The very bad and sad news is that the United States ranked 17th in reading, 23rd in science, and 31th in math. While the article did not give education expenditure information, it is a good bet that the United States ranked much higher in amount of education dollars spent per student than it did in any of the three categories measured. If this assertion is correct, then we are spending a lot of taxpayer money and getting mediocre performance in return.

Which brings us to the Federal Education Department, a bureaucracy that has been around since 1980 and according to its government website, has a discretionary budget of about .7 billion (this does not include the billion or so of Pell grants that it administers).

I guess one could make the argument that without the Education Department, the United States would have finished worse than 17th, 23rd, and 31th.

However, it is likely we could have finished this poorly without spending the .7 billion a year. In fact, if you look at the Education Department website, it acknowledges that "it is important to point out that education in America is a state and local responsibility."  They admit that they are not the main driver of education in this country but still eat up almost billion a year just to fill a supplemental role.

Let's do some fantasy math. What if we terminated the Education Department, what could we do with that money:
Since there are 50 states, you could provide an annual supplemental payment to the states, that the Department fully acknowledges has the main responsibility for educating our kids, of billion per state to help improve their facilities and education processes.
According to the government's National Center For Education Statistics, there are 93,295 public elementary and secondary schools in this country. If we divide this number of schools into the Education Department's budget, each school could theoretically receive an additional 2,000 per school each year to help educate America's youth.
If we purchased the basic iPad product at Best Buys' current price of 9.95, we could outfit over 99 million students in one year with an iPad for themselves. Given today's high tech world, wouldn't iPads (or other worthy technology) be better use of taxpayer funds than a 31st finish in math?
Of course, just having a piece of technology is not going to improve an education process but imagine what could happen in education with an iPad. For example, the need for books and the high expense that goes with the school purchase of books could be diverted to hire more teachers, improve school curriculums, enhance teacher training, etc. since bound paper books are more expensive than electronic digital books, a format that that could also be much easily updated. And this is for only one year. With the technology already purchased in year one, next year, billions of more dollars could be spent on other education needs, if we eliminated the Education Department budget.
If you are not into helping improve our schools, you could divide the .7 billion by the number of U.S. households and give each household an annual check of just over 0. Certainly a better idea than 31st  in math.

The point to be made by these math calculations is that the Education Department has done such a poor job of positioning our kids for success in the world that continuing to budget and pay for this non-performance is a farce. How much worse could it be to take the billion or so and try something new with it? Given that the Department is supplemental, what is the worst that could happen? We fall to 32nd in math? The schools and education approach in Shanghai is getting results, why can't we get the Federal government out of the way and let the states find a way to mimic what Shanghai is obviously doing right and our Education Department is obviously not doing at all?

While reading about our poor performance as a nation academically, it appears that another Federal agency, the Department of Energy, is also a total failure when it comes to its charter. Although it has been over 30 years since the traumatic energy crises of the 1970s, we as a nation are not closer to having a strategic, workable, and rationale national energy plan today than we were when the Department of Energy was formed decades ago.

Think about it: name one success story from the Department of Energy that you can come up with without doing some serious research? We still have no national energy policy. I can think of no significant project, program, or technology that the Department funded with our taxpayer money that has born fruit, either with cheaper energy, better energy, or less reliance on foreign energy sources.

If you look at their Federal website,you see that the Department Of Energy's annual budget is around billion, of which just over billion of that is for Defense Department research. If you took that billion and moved it and its staff into the Defense Department, you could dump the remaining parts of the Department Of Energy and save the taxpayers just over billion a year. This would provide an annual tax reduction of about 0 for every U.S. household. What would you rather have: 0 in your pocket or just another government bureaucracy that did  nothing it was supposed to do?

These are the types of questions that need to be asked as the country faces this extraordinary and looming budget crisis of skyrocketing national debt. Just because we always had a government program, does not mean we need to continue to have these programs. An Education  Department that fails at education and a Department of Energy that fails at energy are not good reasons to continue to have them. Better to try somethng different and less expensive. Again, how much worse could it get when it comes to these two monstrosities? 

Just because something exists today does not mean it has to exist tomorrow. Lehman Brothers, Bear Sterns, Montgomery Ward, Service Merchandise, American Motors, Studebaker, GTE, ITT, the Iron Curtain, the Soviet Union, etc. all existed and are now all gone. Given this historical perspective, getting rid of a mere Cabinet Department or two should be no big deal, especially the ones that are expensive and ineffective, the cause for the demise of these past giants in their respective fields.

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