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organizations—sometimes with the specific goal of increas- ing hospitality programs in developing countries. For instance, says Oskam, ten years ago, the Maastricht Hotel Management School helped create the International Maastricht College, a Dutch-Bulgarian School for Hospitality in Albena, Bulgaria. "Furthermore, the school cooperates with the hotel school system in Cuba and is look- ing into the possibility of establishing similar links with South Africa, China, and Thailand," he says. Even though these administrators feel there is room for Existing schools are considering partnerships with other NOTRE DAME FACULTY Question Conventional Wisdom new programs, they warn that such programs can be difficult and expensive to set up. "You can't really graduate a student in hospitality management without giving that student expe- rience in managing the food and beverage function, and you need laboratory facilities for that function," notes Mann of UNLV. "Food and beverage classes require hands-on train- ing, which means small class sizes, which means many sections and many instructors. Therefore, it's a costly program." It can also be a costly program because it absolutely has to be international to have any value, notes Sloan. In addition, he says, a hospitality program requires close ties with indus- try. "If you don't understand the changing nature of the industry, you're going to lose relevance very, very quickly, and then your students won't be in demand upon gradua- tion," he says. "At the same time, you have to maintain aca- demic credibility. There is a perception sometimes that voca- tional qualifications are not as academic as other areas of study within universities. So you must maintain academic rigor, which requires you to have an understanding of the broader higher educational environment." That academic rigor must focus on management basics to be successful. "If there's a new player in the market, it would serve all of us better if that school gives students a solid, well- rounded business background and builds the hospitality focus on top of that," says Walp. "All the students who then go into the industry would have a baseline knowledge—they would be thinkers and decision-makers—and the specific knowledge they would bring about the industry would just be icing on the cake." That specific knowledge about the hospitality industry Research by Management Professor Glen Dowell and two colleagues showed that multinational firms that use stringent environmental standards have higher stock market valuations. Their finding refutes the idea that adopting global environmental standards by multinational enterprises consti- tutes a liability that depresses market value. Dowell's study received the Moskowitz Prize for outstanding research on socially responsible investing. For more information, www.nd.edu/~ndbizmag undoubtedly will become even more important as the tourism sector continues to flourish worldwide. Even if war in the Middle East disrupts travel and tourism for a while, the hospitality industry has shown it can quickly rebound. Schools looking to find a niche program that will separate them from their peers may very well find that a tourism pro- gram is just their ticket to the global market. ■ z BizEd MAY/JUNE 2003 47