Public relations education "Comparison of undergraduate public relations curricula between Turkey and USA"

vıı ABSTRACT Development and change in communication technologies, competition in industry and commerce and the increasing effect of public broaden public relations content and make it one of the most important subject of today. Organizations use public relations to know the society, its qualities, traditions and customs and present themselves to society by applying public relations practises. At this point, they need public relations practioners creating strategic public relations solutions and using public relations as a two way symetrical communication process. While all of these factors have increased the demand for public relations as a profession, the responsibilities of public relations practitioners have increased with the expectation of organizations from the practitioners. The fact that these responsibilities can not be achieved by laymen puts the importance of university education in this field. With this aim, in the first part of this study, the definition of public relations, the historical developments and public relations proffession are dealt. In the second part, the concept of education and the qualities of university education are explained. Moreover, the features of university education in public relations and the undergraduate public relations curriculum are described. In the last part of the study, the undergraduate public relations curricula of Turkey and the USA are compared in terms of credits, course numbers, required and elective courses, internship, foreign languages, applied courses and courses about technology. The ages, the number of faculties and the total credits of Turkey's communication faculties and the USA's journalism and mass communication schools are analyzed with Pearson correlation. The most important difference that appears between undergraduate public relations curricula of Turkey and the USA is that while there is a standardization in undergraduate public relations curricula of the USA, there isn't this kind of standardization in Turkey's undergraduate public relations curricula.