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ism in Turkey?” she asked. “We are offering Americans a service, selling a service, as well
as offering them a vacation in Turkey—it is an ideal package.”
Associations like Patients Beyond Borders offer lists of doctors and destinations to help
them decide where to look for care for a heart bypass, fertility treatments, face-lifts, dental
implants, anywhere in the world. Some American health insurance companies now in-
clude coverage of both treatment and the cost of a trip overseas to certain preapproved
countries and hospitals. It cuts their costs, even when a beach resort is included.
• • •
The marriage pages of the
New York Times
are a sociologist's playpen. Cultural shifts
show up in the achievements of spouses and their parents, the photographs illustrating the
couple and more recently the sexual orientation of the couples. One Sunday in May 2011,
I spotted an announcement that described a groom as having earned a master's degree in
tourism development from New York University in preparation for his employment as a
director of tourism development for a New York City company.
Finally—a tourism degree made the marriage pages of the
New York Times
Style sec-
tion. The study of tourism has been creeping into the curriculum at American universities
and colleges for four decades, shadowing the growth of the industry. The degrees are in
hospitality studies, tourism research, forestry, parks and recreation, national resources and
recreation, the environment and tourism, hotel administration, hotel and restaurant ad-
ministration, and tourism market development.
I searched the Internet with the help of an assistant and together we found tourism
degree programs in over 450 colleges and universities. The Cornell School of Hotel Ad-
ministration is the premier program in the United States and one of the oldest. The Ivy
League program boasts 800 undergraduates from 30 countries, 70 graduate students and
an astonishing 1,700 professionals who have enrolled for executive education courses.
Tourism has been transformed from a job to an occupation to a profession requiring a
degree—explained in large part by the fact that tourism is creating jobs or professions for
one out of every ten people in the world. Earning legitimacy as a field of study also lends
tourism a seriousness that goes beyond the world of commerce.
Donald Hawkins, the Eisenhower Professor of Tourism Policy at George Washington
University in Washington, D.C., has seen the growth firsthand. At GW the study began as
a graduate program in 1970. In the 1990s it became a discipline in the business school;
students can now earn bachelors and masters degrees and a Ph.D.
“For years tourism was studied mainly by anthropologists, who blamed tourism with ex-
aggerated criticism for all the development curses,” said Professor Hawkins in an interview
in his campus office. “In business studies it is balanced. We look at environmental issues,
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