Prioritization the problems of the comprehensive system of tourism education in Iran from the perspective of entrepreneurship

In order to connect with entrepreneurship, the tourism education system needs to interact with them as a system full of actors with different interests. If this interaction is lacking, the ability of the process of this system to meet the needs of the beneficiaries will face problems. Prevention of such a situation requires planning to strengthen the interaction between the actors of this system and solve their problems. Based on this, the aim of the current research is to find out the most important problems of the process of this system in Iran in the field of entrepreneurship from the point of view of actors in this field. The current research is applied in terms of purpose and qualitative-quantitative in terms of method. In the qualitative part of the research, a number of 177 semi-structured interviews were conducted with the experts of the supply and demand system organizations of tourism education in Iran, and the results of these interviews were analyzed and considered as the input of the quantitative part of the research. The reliability of the closed questions in the semi-structured interview was calculated using SPSS software and Cronbach's alpha coefficient, 0.78 .In the quantitative part of the research, the input topics were entered into the social network analysis software-Gephi- and the indicators extracted from the software were used to analyze the state of the comprehensive system of tourism education in Iran. The results of the research showed that according to the indicators of social network analysis, the subject area of "academic problems" with a high degree of weighted input has the highest score of the subject areas and has the most important problems from the actors' point of view. Four other thematic areas of problems, including organizational relations, systemic view, private sector and infrastructure, have been prioritized in the next level. The inconsistency between academic education and implementation in the field of tourism has the highest centrality of the entry level in the subject area of "academic problems", which indicates its centrality.