Fonte: El Periplo Sustentable; Núm. 46 (2024): Número cuarenta y seis; 286 - 305
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Resumo: Nowadays countries are interested in consolidating higher education in tourism as part of the professionalization of the tourism sector. In 1958 the first undergraduate degree in tourism was created in Mexico being one of the first tourism university programs in Latin America. This research analyzes the emergence of tourism undergraduate degrees and its expansion in Mexico, from the 1950’s to the 2021. The objective is to understand this evolution in both public and private educational institutions and to determine if the evolution of tourism degrees in Mexico has responded to the tourism public policies. A diachronic analysis was used based on an ad hoc database containing information like opening year of the tourism program. Finding indicates an exponential growth of undergraduate tourism programs since 2000 in Mexico. Although first tourism undergraduate programs were aligned with the Mexican tourism public policy that developed destinations like Acapulco or Puerto Vallarta, since the 1990s this link is less clear: Cancun's heyday was in the 80s while the first public undergraduate tourism program in the State of Quintana Roo opened in 2000. Most of the tourism programs opened since 2000 added social and environmental science courses, which shows a change in the traditional teaching of tourism.
