Tourism and Iran's Higher Education: Interaction or Confrontation

The main purpose of this paper is exploring the nature of tourism relation with higher education in the light of conflict theory. This paper is addressing to how extend the policies of tourism development planning and higher education in Iran are convergent or divergent. Since the nature of policy making in two socio –cultural issues such as tourism and higher education are effected from complicated social science bases like power, discipline T conflict, convergent or divergent, so by using of a phenomena-analytical methodology and applying different sources such as review of literature, documents of last five development planning in Iran, review of scholars, and websites of different organization relevant to tourism and higher education, collected data are examined by using of content analysis method.The results indicated that:a- in the last five year development planning of Iran there are less policies to make a relation between Tourism and Higher Education, b-in the first draft of the sixth five year development planning of Iran new relations are considered but due to the current divergent between tourism and higher education activities its successful under critical situation, c-development of tourism must be considered as an interdisciplinary science in the universities and higher education institutions.