Abstract:

Abstract The aim of the study is to determine the factors affecting the department preferences of the students studying in the tourism department, examining the effects of factors on students' life satisfaction and to reveal whether the factors differ according to the age, gender and education level of the students. To achieve this purpose, data were collected from 224 tourism students with associate and bachelor programmes using simple random sampling technique. SPSS 22.0 program was used in orer to analyze the data. As a result of the factor analysis, the expressions constituting the department preference of the students were reduced to four dimensions and the expressions constituting the life satisfaction were reduced to one dimension. Statistically significant differences were found in the choice of the tourism department of the students according to their age, gender and their education level. It has been revealed that the attractiveness of the area from the tourism choice dimensions of the students and their belief that they can realize themselves in this area have a positive effect on their life satisfaction.

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