In the context of role and models in strategic public relations at the communication applications of state and private universities

Today, while traditional public relations techniques continue to be used, on the other hand, with the intervene of technology and internet, change has been as fast as possible and the view on public relations has changed. In this context, public relations have been revised in many ways from its objectives and functions to its models, to practitioner roles to communication studies. This triggered the emergence of professional work within the framework of a strategic purpose by practitioners. In the context of public relations roles and models, the communication practices of state and foundation universities have been questioned from public and foundation universities which ranked 2020 from Istanbul. The aim here is to reveal how the public and foundation universities in the ranking are working within the framework of strategic public relations and to show the differences or similarities between the role, model and communication practices among state and foundation universities. In this framework, a number of public and foundation universities in Istanbul (Boğaziçi, İstanbul Teknik, Marmara, İstanbul, Yıldız Teknik, Sabancı, Bahçeşehir, Istanbul Medipol and Yeditepe Universities), which ranked 2020 by Times Higher Education, the British ranking agency, were selected as the area of this research. The semi-structured interview with top public relations practitioners of these universities reveals whether there are differences in universities by addressing which communication practices they perform according to which roles and models, where public relations take place in the internal hierarchy. In the study, which was analyzed through in-depth interview method, which is one of the qualitative research methods, it was determined that the Press Agency and Publicity Model were used predominantly in public and foundation universities, and the role of administrators was dominant in terms of implementing roles. It is seen that public universities are limited to public relations activities, since they are not autonomous in terms of budget and have a very limited budget due to public savings measures. Even though foundation universities are autonomous in terms of budget compared to public universities, it has been learned that they allocate limited budgets to strategic public relations studies since they use their budget for publicity and advertisement purposes. Finally, since the studies on strategic public relations in the department are handled at a limited level, state and foundation universities; rather than strategic public relations (such as corporate social responsibility, issue management, sponsorship); it can be said that they act within the framework of traditional public relations (media relations, event management, etc.).