Aprons are a rare commodity in the hands of restaurant management majors at San Diego State University. While other college curriculums might see them cutting steaks or scrubbing plates, students at SDSU settle for scavenger hunts and slideshows.
“When I come here and you tell me that I can have this emphasis in restaurants, I’m going to assume that there are at least five classes to pick from,” says Alexa Hart, a line cook and restaurant management major.
Hart is already in her third year at SDSU, but it was just last semester that she took her very first restaurant management course. The next one’s penciled in for spring, 2027.
Across a restaurant management student’s four years at SDSU, 1,000 hours are to be spent outside the school working for a restaurant, according to the L. Robert Payne School of Hospitality and Tourism Management’s official website. The school’s catalog lists seven “Restaurant Major Emphasis” courses, but three are general hospitality and nutrition classes. One is an internship: 300 of the total 1,000 required hours of work. Hart argues that the school only offers three “real” restaurant courses, with the major largely built to accommodate hotel management and event planning emphases.
Comparatively, the University of Nevada, Las Vegas—a school that largely matches SDSU in enrollment numbers and demographics—includes nine dedicated courses, according to their own hospitality catalog. This pairs with a 10-station kitchen facility, beverage lab and student-operated cafe.
Aiden Schappert, a second-year restaurant management student, concurs with Hart.
“There was only one guest speaker [in the introductory class] on restaurants and everything else was meetings, events, hotels … there aren’t a lot of classes before you get into the upper division that really focus on the restaurant emphasis,” he says. “So I feel like a lot of people coming into hospitality might be pushed to hotels.”
While faculty members largely recognize this concern, some make peace with the interdisciplinary study, according to Hart.
“With the larger hotel corporations, there's a much bigger network for success for the students,” says Tyler Martin, a restaurant management lecturer for SDSU. “Of course, I would love to see more restaurant focus because I obviously have a heart the size of Texas for this industry but … I feel like it’s a shrinking business.”
Martin, also the regional general manager for Brigantine Restaurant Group, was a part of SDSU’s premier class of hospitality students. The undergraduate pathway, officially the Hospitality & Tourism Management program, began in 1999.
Martin describes the founding HTM class as being far smaller than its present-day iteration, estimating a headcount of eight or nine students in total. He guesses that increasingly larger classes have burdened an unchanging curriculum. But he also sees some value in the way the path is set up.
“It's like, hotels have restaurants, right?” he observes. “So even a hotel emphasis [student] can come through and take my class or any other restaurant class. There's a whole other component to it.”
But Hart says that’s often not the case.
“I’m in an events class right now, I have to [take it]. We’re thrown into their major while they don’t even have to touch ours,” she says, polling from her local network of HTM students. “Which is how it should be … so why are we having to take their [classes]?”
Indeed, the catalog lists several hotel and event operations courses on the core restaurant management pathway. The opposite isn’t true. Instead, core courses like Introduction to Restaurant Management become the reciprocal classes that exchange students can choose to earn credits in. Hart mentions that non-hospitality exchange students made up over half the class last semester, whose lack of engagement made group projects difficult.
Hart also cites a frustration with the hospitality classes in general. She recalls conversations with friends and family about their expectations for her major: “They have no idea that I’m not doing [anything] … and then every class I’m in, I learn the same three things every time. And then the final project is always some group slideshow every single time. Every time.”
Schappert also has trouble finding a use for some of his lower-division courses.
“Generally, there's a lot of carryover with some of the skills, like learning people skills and business skills I guess … but I feel like I would be a different major if I wanted that” he says. “I'm leaning towards hospitality in the restaurant emphasis. And I don't think I'm getting too much ‘restaurant’ out of it.”
Hart intends to pursue her original goal, enrollment at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., after she graduates from SDSU. Two of her peers plan on following suit.
“I was just hoping that being here would make me more invested in management as a career,” Hart says, exasperated. “And I think, for a second, it did happen in the restaurant [management] class. It did happen.”