Effects on the university preferences of education services marketing efforts

According to the Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), approximately 17% of Turkey's population is composed of young people in the 15-24 age group. In order to meet higher educational demand of the increasing young population, new universities are established every year. The increasing number of state and foundation universities leaves the applicants and their families in a puzzling situation at the university preference period. During the university preference period, foundation universities offer many attractive alternatives to the applicants via phone calls, messages, handouts, and promotion days. These efforts influence the preference of applicants and direct them to foundation universities instead of state universities. Even more, the future goals of the applicants are differentiated such that an applicant willing to study medicine may choose engineering as a career path. While this situation is a consequence of the competition between the universities, it is also the point that evolves education as a marketing area. In our country, education marketing has not been a hot topic that is deeply researched. However, it is an interesting subject since it is a special purpose service and contains different strategies than traditional marketing techniques. The universities aim to be up-to-date while they are trying to adopt the alternating global information conditions. In order to achieve their goals, they need to apply strategic marketing techniques and create a brand perception. Furthermore, they should market this perception correctly as the brand perception is an effective factor for the applicants in choosing their future education. In this thesis, education, a high priority subject that provides added value to the country, is investigated in terms of the utilization of the shareholders. For this purpose, the opinions of students, academicians, and experts are be gathered and analyzed by applying various methods. Surveys are organized to students to investigate the effects of educational services over preferences. Meetings are scheduled with academicians and experts to get their opinions about the subject. While analyzing the factors that affect applicant preferences, a decision making and forecasting method is used.