Samui College of Business Administration and Tourism.

Qualification, in plain words

Upper-secondary and post-secondary vocational certificates -- the Vocational Certificate (ปวช.) and the High Vocational Certificate (ปวส.) -- together with short courses. Reported subject areas centre on hotel work, tourism, accounting and business/office administration. This is not a degree site.

Awarded or overseen by: Office of the Vocational Education Commission (OVEC), Ministry of Education. In Thailand the body whose name is on the gate is often not the body that confers the qualification, so this is worth checking before you commit to a place to live around a campus.

On the founding year: 2013 is the year the establishment agreement was signed between Koh Samui City Municipality and the Office of the Vocational Education Commission; teaching began later.

Address as published: Moo 1, Taling Ngam sub-district, Ko Samui District, Surat Thani (วิทยาลัยบริหารธุรกิจและการท่องเที่ยวสมุย / วิทยาลัยการอาชีพเกาะสมุย)

Samui College of Business Administration and Tourism at a glance

Koh Samui has a state vocational college, and it is the piece most guides to the island miss. It was agreed on 14 November 2013, when the Mayor of Koh Samui City Municipality and the Secretary-General of the Office of the Vocational Education Commission signed a cooperation agreement to establish a vocational college for the district. As reported at the signing, the site is a plot of about 8 rai 2 ngan 43 square wa at Moo 1 in Taling Ngam sub-district, on the island's western side, planned around Vocational Certificate and High Vocational Certificate courses for roughly 400 students a year plus short courses for several hundred more.

The reason it exists is a housing fact as much as an education one. The municipality's case at the time was that around a thousand Samui students finished lower- or upper-secondary school each year and that many had to leave the island to continue, because there was not enough post-school provision here. The college is how the district answered that -- and it is why a family relocating with a teenager who is not heading for an international-school track now has an on-island option that did not exist before.

Notable facts

• The college's name is published inconsistently by the authorities themselves. OVEC's national list of government institutions in Surat Thani calls it วิทยาลัยบริหารธุรกิจและการท่องเที่ยวสมุย; OVEC's Southern Region 1 dual-education centre, run out of Surat Thani Technical College, lists it among the province's eight colleges as วิทยาลัยบริหารธุรกิจและการท่องเที่ยวเกาะสมุย; the municipality's own news listing and the college's Facebook page publish as วิทยาลัยการอาชีพเกาะสมุย, Koh Samui Industrial and Community Education College. We could not establish from a published order which name is currently the legal one, so both are given here -- either will find it.
• It is the only Ko Samui institution on OVEC's list of government vocational institutions in Surat Thani, and the only one of the province's eight state colleges with no website listed on the regional centre's own directory. Expect to reach it by phone or Facebook rather than by web form.
• Taling Ngam is a genuinely quiet, largely Thai part of the island -- a very different setting from Chaweng or Bo Phut, and worth factoring into a school-run if you are choosing where to live around it.