The School of Hotel and Restaurant Administration awarded FIPSE Grant

The School of Hotel and Restaurant Administration (HRAD) in the College of Human Environmental Sciences (HES) was awarded a multi-year educational program development grant through the U.S. Department of Education’s FIPSE (Funds for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education) program.  The project was titled, “H.O.T.E.L (Higher Opportunities for Training, Education, and Languages) Atlantis Project,’ and falls under the aegis of the E.U.-U.S. Atlantis Program of FIPSE. Dr. Radesh Palakurthi, Charles W. Lanphere Distinguished Professor and Graduate Program Coordinator is the Principal Investigator and Program Director for the grant and Dr. Richard Ghiselli, HRAD School Director is the Co-Principal Investigator. 

The grant was funded for a four-year period from September 2008 through October 2012 for a total of $408,000 for OSU through the U.S. Department of Education and an additional €408,000 ($607,575) by the European Commission's Directorate General for Education and Culture, for the European partner institutions- Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, and Turku University of Applied Sciences, in Turku, Finland. The total impact of the grant is about $1.4 million including an automatic fifth year extension.  Through this grant, the partners will develop an innovative dual-degree undergraduate program in hospitality management that would allow students to acquire two undergraduate degrees within four to five years; one from OSU and one from one of the E.U. partner institutions. A total of 48 students (24 from each side of the Atlantic) are expected to graduate from this special program before its completion.  

The specific purpose of the program is to educate students about the nuances of managing a diverse workforce in the rapidly globalizing lodging industry.  By design, the curriculum places a strong emphasis on cultural training, foreign language skills, and foreign work placement along with the core content for global lodging operations.  Students will be required to study abroad (E.U. students in the U.S. and OSU students in Europe) for a total of 18 months including work placement experience.  Strategically, the program is aimed at creating transparency in credit transfers and credential recognition across various educational systems in Europe and the U.S. by encouraging the development of articulation agreements, MOUs, and student and faculty mobility and exchange programs.