From the New Sociological Institutionalism point of view, we have seen what the missions that institutionally Spanish public universities assume in their strategic plans are. It has been applied the content analysis approach. We have found that indicators are more frequent to teaching activities, in second place appeared research activities and in third place were knowledge transfer activities. Not all universities assume the same grade of institutionalization for each mission. In fact, we have obtained a typology of universities split in two groups, one focused to teaching and another focused to research and knowledge transfer.