A case study and an analytical survey on the institutional structure of the administrative units of the erasmus exchange programmes at higher education institution in Turkey

The European Union Education Programmes have been put into practice by the European countries and aim at developing the exchange between the member and candidate countries in all fields of the general and vocational education. The Erasmus Programme which is under the Socrates Programme that focuses on the general education provides student and lecturer exchange for the university education in Europe. The programme which was established in 1995 in Europe started to be carried out in Turkey in 2002. The advertisement and the coordination of these programmes have been practiced by the National Agency which has been established under the State Planning Organization. The universities establish the Erasmus Offices in their institutions and provide not only the academic advertisement of the cooperated projects and other works but also students and lecturers within the scope of Erasmus Programme.In our thesis, we conduct a descriptive study on the organizational structures of the Erasmus Offices in Turkey. Since it is not possible to investigate all of the universities in Turkey, we will focus on the Erasmus Offices of the 20 universities which reached to the highest number of student exchange in fall 2005 and spring 2006 terms according to the list provided by the National Agency. We will specify the qualitative and quantitative variables which provide them with founding and the development by exploring the web sites of those organizations. We will investigate the orientation programs and other related works for the incoming students, the country preferences of the students who go to the Europe and the factors which affect the preferences of the students, and finally the information which should be included in the websites of the Erasmus Offices. At the end of the descriptive study, we will deal with the effects of the above mentioned variables on the application of the Erasmus Programme. In the final part of our thesis, we will conduct a case study and analytical survey for the Erasmus Office of the Yıldız Technical University. By investigating the development of the organizational structure of the institution since 2005, we will specify the strong and weak aspects of the structure.We will end our study by providing suggestions for the development of the organizational structure of this institution.