Same two schools. Same one industry. The gap just got wider
BY KUNAL VASUDEVA
Walk into any luxury hotel in India today. The lobby is stunning. The technology is seamless. The brand standards are global. Now walk into the HR department of that same hotel and ask one question. How do you differentiate between a graduate from a business school of hospitality and a graduate from a skills school of hospitality when you recruit?
Most will not have an answer. Not because they are incompetent. Because the question has never been formally asked. That is where India’s hospitality talent crisis actually lives.
For decades, hospitality education in India meant one thing. The IHM system. Government-built, competency-anchored, designed to produce skilled operators for a newly independent nation building its tourism infrastructure. It did that job. It still does. Front office. Food production. Housekeeping. Structured, standardised, replicable skill. That was the design intent and largely the output.
Then something changed. A second generation of institutions emerged. Some quietly, some ambitiously. Institutions that were not trying to produce the same profile. Institutions that asked a different question entirely. Not how do we train someone to execute a standard operating procedure. But how do we develop someone to lead a business, build a culture, reimagine a guest experience, and eventually run a P&L. India now has both. A skills school of hospitality and a business school of hospitality. Both legitimate. Both necessary. Completely different in design, intent, and output. The industry has not noticed.
The data makes it impossible to look away
In 2019, roughly 35,000 students appeared for the NCHMCT JEE. That is the single national qualifying examination for hotel management education in India. Today that number is estimated at somewhere between 8,000 and 11,000. A collapse of nearly 70 per cent in six years. Students and families have looked at hotel management as a career path and decided it is not worth the investment. That is not a perception problem. That is a verdict.
At the same time, hospitality remains one of India’s highest attrition industries. Estimates from sector skill councils consistently place annual attrition in frontline and supervisory roles between 30 and 40 per cent. The standard explanation is compensation. The real explanation is misplacement.
When a graduate trained to think like a business leader is recruited into a role designed for a skilled operator, one of two things happens. They leave within 18 months because the ceiling is visible from day one. Or they stay and quietly shrink to fit a box that was never built for them. Either way the industry loses. Twice. It loses the person and it loses the productivity that person could have generated in the right role.
What Europe understood that India did not
EHL Lausanne has had continuous industry partnership embedded in its governance since 1893. Les Roches and Glion, both part of Sommet Education, the same group within which the Indian School of Hospitality operates, have industry advisory structures that are not consultative. They are constitutive. Industry does not advise the curriculum from outside. It helps build it from within. Practitioners teach. Research is co-commissioned with hotel groups. Graduate pipelines are designed before the students arrive.
The result is a taxonomy of talent that European hospitality HR understands instinctively. A Les Roches graduate and a vocational hotel school graduate do not walk into the same interview process at a luxury European hotel group. Not because one is more valuable as a human being. Because the roles they are being considered for require different cognitive profiles and the industry built systems long ago that reflect that distinction.
India has not done this work. And the NCHMCT numbers are the consequence.
HR slept. The talent walked
In every other knowledge industry in India, recruitment architecture distinguishes between institution types. An IIT graduate and a state engineering college graduate do not enter the same interview process at a technology firm. A graduate of the Indian Institutes of Management does not receive the same entry-level offer as a graduate of a regional business college. The industry built that taxonomy because it understood that different institutions produce different cognitive profiles for different organisational needs.
Hospitality HR has not done this work. Job descriptions look identical. Compensation bands are indistinguishable at entry level. Career ladders follow the same gradient regardless of what kind of thinking the candidate was trained to do. The graduate who spent three years studying experiential luxury, macroeconomics of travel, and leadership philosophy walks in through the same door as every other candidate and is handed the same offer letter. That is a structural failure. And it is costing the industry more than it realises.
What needs to change and who needs to change it
Every Indian profession that solved a comparable alignment problem solved it the same way. The Institute of Chartered Accountants of India sets standards that education must meet. The Medical Council of India governs what a medical graduate must demonstrate before they enter practice. The Bar Council does the same for law. These bodies do not just certify. They create the compulsion for alignment between the profession’s needs and what the classroom produces.
Hospitality has no equivalent body. There is no overarching professional institution that tells schools what competencies a graduate must demonstrate. There is no mechanism by which industry’s five-year plan formally informs a school’s curriculum review. There is no shared accountability. There is only complaint from one side and defensiveness from the other.
The shift that needs to happen is not complicated. It requires hospitality HR to develop what every maturing industry eventually develops. A taxonomy of talent. A clear, codified understanding of which roles require skilled execution and which require business thinking. And a recruitment, onboarding, and development architecture built around that distinction.
Liberal hospitality education exists. ISH and institutions like it have spent years building curricula that sit at the intersection of liberal thinking, business rigour, and hospitality philosophy. Graduates who can read a market, lead diverse teams, and hold a conversation about brand strategy with ownership. The graduates exist. The roles that need them exist. The missing piece is the institutional will within HR to build the bridge.
The close...
India’s hospitality industry is globally ambitious. Its hotels are world-class. Its food culture is having a moment the world is watching. India will add hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms over the next decade. The investment is real. The expansion is real. The only thing that has not grown at the same pace is how the industry thinks about the people it hires and develops.
The European schools did not become reference institutions by accident. They became reference institutions because the industry decided the classroom was its business. India has been waiting for that decision for five decades.
Every year this question goes unasked, the industry pays for it in people it never kept.
