Cornell’s Nolan School of Hotel Administration Continues Mission in its Second Century
By David Berman | August 18, 2023
Today, we’re launching our Higher Education Spotlight series as part of Hotel Interactive’s premium content. In order for hospitality executives to shape the future of the industry, they must understand how the next generation is being taught. Through this series, we will highlight different hospitality higher education programs around the country, covering students, faculty and curriculum that are making waves.
The first article today is a profile of The Cornell Peter and Stephanie Nolan School of Hotel Administration, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year.
Kate Walsh has deep ties to Cornell. In her eighth year as dean of the Nolan School, Walsh used to be a CPA before getting her master’s degree at the school. She received her PhD from Boston College and joined the faculty at Cornell in 2000.
For over two decades now, Walsh has watched the program evolve to fit the ever-changing hospitality landscape. With a focus on a strong, engaged alumni base and molding the soft skills of its students, the Nolan School has a unique place in the hospitality higher education landscape.
“Coming back here was like coming home,” Walsh said. “It’s a school that is very much known for a value proposition that includes alumni. We have very dedicated faculty who work closely with and get to know our students personally and help them uncover what their passion is. And then our alumni who really are infused throughout the industry in leadership roles provide the internship and first job opportunities.
“It’s a very, very special place and a privilege. It’s a joy to be able to teach and a privilege to be able to teach here because it values that relationship approach so much.”
In the early 90s, the Nolan School carved a niche in hospitality higher education programs by developing a specialty in hospitality real estate, Walsh said. Nolan School students are prepared to take on asset management, private equity and advisory roles “anywhere along the value chain in our industry.”
The specialty in real estate was a benefit to the program and its students once the pandemic hit, Walsh said.
“A lot of the other hospitality programs were telling their students, ‘there are no jobs, pivot to luxury or something else,’” she said. “Our students were getting multiple job offers because of that expertise that they were able to obtain being students with us.”
Starting salaries for graduates of the program are currently around $90,000 before benefits and signing bonuses, Walsh said.
Peter Liu has been a professor at Cornell for 16 years with an expertise in real estate, asset management and tourism. Liu said the school’s emphasis on hospitality real estate gives it an important differentiator among other top hospitality programs. In fact, Liu said the Nolan School is less like a hospitality program and more like a business school.
“You have every perspective of our industry: accounting, finance, real estate, management and marketing, human resources, and law; everything,” Liu said. “We’re driven by the industry. Where the industry needs it, we have courses prepared for students.”
Other areas of focus for the school beyond real estate are data analytics, entrepreneurship and sustainability. The school recently brought on two engineering-trained faculty to teach students about analytics and artificial intelligence, and sustainability is a part of the greater “Cornell ethos,” Walsh said.
Hands-on learning opportunities are a key part of the Nolan School curriculum as well. Walsh said the program strives to develop students’ emotional intelligence and ability to be great colleagues through immersive scenarios and group projects. A capstone course that every student must take, regardless of interest in the subject, is restaurant management, where students take on different roles in a real restaurant the school runs five times a week.
The Statler Hotel in Ithaca is also run by the school, where over 200 students are employed every year. The school has a “supervisory program” where students work side by side with professionals in different positions to gain valuable experience.
Before graduation, students must have 800 hours of work in the industry. Walsh said these and other hands-on opportunities extend students’ education beyond the classroom and into real-life scenarios.
“It’s very much about applying the concepts you’re learning in your classroom,” Walsh said. “I can give you so many examples, from case competitions to our cruise class. It is entirely all about experiential opportunities for them to try out the concepts that our faculty are teaching in class. It’s really signature; it’s super important.”
In its first century of existence, the Nolan School has evolved its teaching philosophies, Walsh said. The school used to offer many more “skills-based management” courses that were based more around the fundamentals of running an individual property. Now, while those courses still exist, the curriculum has shifted to a broader view of how the industry is constantly changing. Administration is considering analytics, artificial intelligence and other technologies to forecast how the industry might look in 10-15 years.
“Over the years it was about the hospitality business,” Walsh said. “We’ve evolved to what we call the business of hospitality. So we’re training future leaders not to be future general managers, but to run this amazing industry one day, and that’s a super important evolution.”
As the Nolan School shifts focus to its next 100 years, Walsh said the program will continue to strive for excellence. Training students to be analytically-minded while also growing their soft skills is key to creating a well-rounded hospitality professional.
Like many corners of hospitality, higher education was also impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Many programs had to shift to completely remote learning. Liu said the pandemic had negative impacts on the educational process in the short-term but has led to more adaptability in the present.
“I understand there’s flexibility in the benefits of learning things remotely, or why now people talk about their work remotely,” he said. “We can be more productive and get things done.”
Current upperclassmen in the Nolan School started college during the peak of the pandemic. Isabella Suffredini, a rising junior, said despite challenges presented by online classes and masked social gatherings, she has had a great experience at Cornell since the start.
“The hotel school did an incredible job,” Suffredini, one of the leaders of the Hotel School Mentorship Program, said. “I know a bunch of friends (who go to school) in other places who did not have the same experience because it was go to class, mask on go back and study. And that’s just kind of the way that it always is. But the Hotel School was so focused on hospitality and so focused on people that really knew that they needed to figure out how to maintain the community, and they did.”
David Salmonson, a rising senior and co-chair of the Dean’s Student Advisory Board, said there’s a sense of camaraderie in the Nolan School that helped get students and faculty through the dark days of pandemic learning.
“I think hospitality itself being a very people-oriented industry, I think when it did come to coming back, I think we were very tight knit,” Salmonson said. “Students wanted to meet professors, professors wanted to meet students. I know plenty of people feel this way that they don’t take going into class in person for granted anymore, which is totally valid, and I totally feel the same exact way.”
Suffredini said she doesn’t know of “any school that has more” hands-on opportunities for students as part of the curriculum. A few examples she provided were a freshman year project where she analyzed the operational practices of a local restaurant and working shifts at the Statler Hotel. She also is a part of Hotel Ezra Cornell, a three-day, student-run conference for hospitality professionals. This year, Suffredini is the Director of Sales for the event.
“It’s such a cool hands-on experience and such a collaborative experience too because you work with everyone all year round to put on this incredible event,” she said.
As Salmonson and Suffredini prepare for their final year or two at Cornell, they both are grateful for the time they’ve had in the program and are excited for what’s to come. Salmonson reflected on a speech Walsh made to incoming freshman in his first year where she said that the students were there to learn the “business of people.”
“It doesn’t really matter if you’re going into hospitality, afterwards or if you’re going into another area of higher education going to grad school, there’s going to be people that you’re going to have to work with somewhere you’re going to get along with and somebody you’re not going to get along with,” he said. “You have to understand how to work and operate with people. I think that’s what differentiates the students in the hotel school.”
