Who Influences College Students’ Career Choices? An Empirical Study of Hospitality Management Students

Abstract

Career development theory explains that although graduates can make their own career decisions, such decisions can also be determined by a variety of influences, such as family, school, community, and social factors (K. A. Jungen, 2008). The majority of hospitality management college students are from Generation Y and are influenced by social media. Therefore, the aim of this research was to explore the extent to which different influential career decision-making factors (i.e., advisors, industry mentors, parents, faculty members, and social media) impact hospitality management students. An online survey was used, and 558 completed surveys were collected. The results of this study show that traditional factors can be a greater influence on students’ career decisions than social media. Administrators of hospitality management programs should consider adopting and maximizing both traditional and online approaches to assist students in their career decision making.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 68 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.