The effects of strategic management practices on the achievement levels of public universities in Turkey

The scope of this paper is to investigate strategic management practices in public universities in Turkey, and analyze their effects on the level of success of these universities. The hypotheses in this study, along with their internal and external analyses, were formulated based on the assumption that "the strategic management practices positively affect the performance of the public universities". The goal of the study is to draw attention to the significance of strategic management practices and strategic planning in the subject universities, and offer suggestions based on metrics derived by analyzing whether such practices were applied, and if applied, the level of which they were applied in the management practices of these universities. As of 2023, there are 206 universities in Turkiye. 129 of these universities are public and 77 of them are private non-profit institutions. In 2022-2023 academic year there were 2580 commission members in public universities who worked on strategic planning. Also, in the same academic year, 1860 administrative personnel employed at strategic planning departments (Council of Higher Education, 2023). The subjects evaluated in this study are mainly those who took part in administrative duties. In this paper, 400 academic and administrative personnel were studied using non-random sampling methods using data collected using online surveying. The study utilized variance based structural equivalence model to statistically analyze the sample population. Based on the effect magnitude, it was deducted that: 1. The internal and external environmental analysis has low impact on the four (4) dimensions of the strategic implementation process. 2. Strategic planning and strategic elasticity have high impact on institutional performance level. 3. Control of the strategies has moderate impact on institutional performance level. When the results of this study were examined, it was observed that only 3 of the 22 hypotheses tested were refuted. This observation suggests that the strategic management practices in public universities in Turkiye, has favorable effects on the level of success of these universities.