an outline of the expansion in higher education is presented in Table 1. Although thereare some discrepancies in the coverage between the different years the growth is clearly pronounced and appears to be continuing. As Airey (1995) has pointed out, the growth hasfar outstripped the expansion in higher education itself or in the growth of tourism. Heidentified four factors lying behind this growth: a long term growing emphasis on vocation-alism throughout education; greater attention by students to the employment opportunities provided by their programmes of study; changes in the funding and regulation of higher education whereby institutions have been free to compete with each other for student de-mand and the associated income that it brings; and a recognition by colleges and universi-ties that tourism is a way of expanding student numbers more reliably and cheaply thanmany other subject areas. This growth of course is not confined to the UK. Other authorshave commented on similar patterns in other countries. In Italy for example all the 14 tour-ism courses in Universities have been introduced since 1992 (Dipartimento del Turismo,1996). For accounts from other parts of the world see for example Koshizucha
et al
(1998)for Japan and Payne (1998) for Australia.