welve students—ten hospitality and two
business majors—from Florida
International University (FIU), left on
August 22 to study for a semester at FIU’s
new satellite campus of hospitality management
at Tianjin Commerce University, located
about 40 miles from Beijing, China. As the first U.S.
hospitality program to open a satellite campus in
Mainland China, Tianjin’s municipal government
funded the development of the program and asked
FIU to run it.
“Over four years ago, at the behest of the
Chinese government, FIU began to develop a curriculum
and faculty for a school of hospitality and
tourism management in the People’s Republic of
China, to be funded entirely by the Chinese people,”
says Joseph J. West, dean and professor, School of
Hospitality and Tourism Management, FIU. “The mission
of the program is to educate FIU students, both
China- and Miami-based, to meet the demands of the
global hospitality and tourism industries … As the
global marketplace changes, the leading hospitality
corporations of the world expect their managers and
executives to be knowledgeable in the nuances of
international business.”
In addition to their core hospitality and tourism
curriculum, other educational opportunities, such as
Chinese language and culture courses, are available
to students while they are in China. Plus, field trips
are designed for students to experience different parts
of the country. An excellent opportunity, the program
is designed to give those students with an international
background an advantage in the job market.
With 760 students at the Tianjin campus, the
agreement creates FIU's largest foreign program,
bigger than its hospitality programs operating in
Jamaica and Switzerland. As part of the Chinese
program, the Tianjin campus will host exchange students
and faculty from all FIU campuses. FIU's
School of Tourism and Hospitality, ranked among the
top five in the United States, is based at the
Biscayne Bay campus, where 1,035 students from 50
states and 82 countries study.
For more information, visit www.fiu.edu.
