The Importance Of Internalizatıon Of Public Relations Education: A Comparative Study On England And Turkey

Since the first public relations lessons have been given by Edward Bernays in 1923 in USA New York University till today, public relations undergraduate education can be seen as a seperate department/program in universities in every country of the world particularly in USA and western countries that service sector has been developed. Today, internationalization of public relations BA programs’ curriculums has become obligation by the effect of globalization. The primary reason of it, the need of enriching public relations practitioners’ qualifications so that they can compete in this new global business enviroment. As a matter of fact now target audiences of public relations area have been in a wide range of variety. Not only international institutions and organizations, but also small and medium scaled enterprises continue their activities within the scope of internationalization. In this context, top ten universities have been chosen by entry standards for each two countries Turkey and England, which offer public relations education in the perspective of European model, and those universities’ curriculums have been analysed via their websites and the rates of internationalization have been determined by this research. As a result of the analyse, it has been understood that all universities’ rates of internationalization are below of 10% except for Leeds Beckett University in England and Gazi University in Turkey. In England, it is suprising to find that there are no lessons in terms of internationalization at Manchester Metropolitan University, University of Greenwich, University of West London and University of the Arts London. In Turkey, the lowest rate stands out as 1,79% for Anadolu University, followed by Adnan Menderes University with a rate of 4,17%. This result indicates that public relations curriculums’ internationalization should be accepted as an education policy for all universities instead of leaving it to universities’ preferences. At this point, the necessity of doing some serious studies has come up about public relations education’ internationalization for standardization and creating awareness concerning to the subject. It can be said these future studies will bring to a successful conclusions on meeting the current needs of public relations sector correspondingly everchanging global balance.