Educational tourism is one of the links between universities and tourist destinations. Academic and educational tourists travel to a place distant from their places of residence to take academic courses at the destination place lasting less than a year. Educational tourism intentionally combines formal and structured learning with touristic experience promoting educational and career advancement as well as the intended benefits of leisure activities. Herein is a review of Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez’s paper “The role of tourist destination in international students’ choice of academic centre: the case of Erasmus Programme in the Canary Islands”.
Having appreciated the correlation between higher learning and traveling for leisure, Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez (2015) in their study wanted to establish “which factors – the tourist destination or the university one – have a greater influence on the choice of a place for an Erasmus exchange” (185). The Erasmus Program – or the European Community Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students – is a European Commission-ran program that provides learners with an opportunity to study or gain work experience in another country while completing a degree as part of the Lifelong Learning Program.
The researchers concede that despite the growth of educational tourism and its importance in contemporary times, literature has not widely analyzed it. Much of the literature available on educational tourism focuses on areas such as the behavior of the students, the students’ motivations and the difficulties they encounter as well as the costs and economic impacts of the exchanges. Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez also cite a work that touches on the relationship between student motivations (push factors) and destination attractions (pull factors) and how they influence academic tourists’ decision-making.
In their study, the researchers choose to focus on an area where very minimal research is available. Their focus is on the influence of two pull factors on academic tourists’ decision-making. To answer their research question, Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez employed a mixed-method approach with a qualitative bias to establish which factors between host university factors and the destination factors bore more influence on the place where a student on the Erasmus Program chose to study. To gather the necessary data, Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez (2015) sent electronic questionnaires in English, Italian and Spanish to 2,144 potential respondents who had been students under the Erasmus Program at the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) in the Canary Islands between 2005/2006 and 2010/2011 academic years.
The questionnaires had three sets of questions in three distinct sections. The first section contained questions whose concern was the general personal motivations within the students that made them enroll in the Erasmus Program. The second section contained questions – Likert Scale of 7 questions – concerned with the University of La Laguna (Tenerife) (place of study) factors and the Canary Islands (tourist destination) factors – a dual Model – to discern the level of influence that either set of factors had on the students’ choices. In the third section, the researchers asked the students personal data questions – gender, age, home country, and duration of exchange – which they used to characterize them.
The following were the researchers’ findings. Is as far as general personal motivations within the students that made them enroll in the Erasmus Program are concerned, Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez (2015) established that students enrolled in the Erasmus Program for three main reasons; to “improve the knowledge of other languages, to meet other cultures, and for personal development” (182). On the institution versus destination factors question – the mainstay of the research – the researchers established that the destination factors were superior to the university factors – 4.28 versus 3.88, respectively on the 7‑points Likert scale.
Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez ranked all the factors based on the Likert score average each factor scored. In the top ten factors, the first eight are destination factors, while all the bottom ten factors are university factors. The high scores of destination factors such as natural resources, culture and history, and the possibility of leisure activities prove the fact that the destination has more influence than the institution when academic tourists are deciding to enroll in a given course while on leisure visits.
To underscore the importance of destination factors as opposed to institution factors, Garcia-Rodriguez and Jimenez constructed an index expressing the percentage of respondents who gave any given factor more than five Likert points. The resultant percent values were congruent with the earlier findings, only that the affordability of the place moved up from fourth to third in the new index ranking.
The researchers’ approach to this study is agreeable to from a personal perspective. The dual model that they use to compare two pull factors – place vs institution – does well from a descriptive assessment of the study objective because it gives data about what people feel propels them to decide to enrol in a course while on leisure travel. The main lesson one can draw from this study is that students on the Erasmus Programme in the Canary Islands – and perhaps all academic tourists elicit more attraction to the place/destination than to the institution. Additionally, many academic tourists on Erasmus enrol for personal rather than academic development reasons.
Another noteworthy lesson is the influence of prices on academic tourists’ decision to enroll through the Erasmus Programme or to travel to a given destination. Further research on this subject should widen the scope by targeting more destinations and more institutions to arrive at a generalizable conclusion on this study subject.
Reference
Garcia‑Rodriguez, F. J., & Jimenez, J. M. (2015). The role of tourist destination in international students’ choice of academic centre: the case of Erasmus Programme in the Canary Islands. Revista de Turismo y Patrimonio Cultural, 13(1), 175-189. Web.