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Why do higher education institutions internationalize? An investigation of the multilevel determinants of internationalization rationales

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Abstract

In recent decades internationalization has risen to prominence in higher education institutions (HEIs). Scholars have identified several rationales for internationalization. There is however a lack of conceptual understanding and empirical evidence for which rationale(s) for internationalization are chosen by a given HEI and why. The goal of this article is to fill this gap. We develop and test a conceptual framework to predict the salience of a given rationale for a specific HEI. The framework integrates factors at multiple levels, namely competitive and institutional forces in the global and national contexts, the organizational goals and the influence of internal actors. The empirical analysis employs information on more than 400 European HEIs from two large datasets on their organizational characteristics and from a large-scale survey on internationalization of universities. The findings show that the HEIs embedded in a global context more frequently conceive internationalization as an instrumental to prestige. The national contexts do not greatly affect HEIs’ rationales, and the amount of resources is less important than the competition for resources. Organizational goals as well as the influence of students, faculty members and middle managers on the internationalization process partly predict the prominence of specific rationales. The paper closes discussing the findings and the implication for scholarly research.

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Notes

  1. One-way ANOVA on 309 HEIs from EUMIDA dataset. Given the strong between-country variation, it is appropriate to conceive resources as a country-level variable (Glick 1985).

  2. The average correlation of the responses (within HEIs) is 0.45 compared to a 0.08 correlation between all responses.

  3. We excluded the type of HEI variable, because of conceptual overlap with the—“doctorate awarding” variable and strong correlation (0.66).

  4. HEI value from the respondents means can produce non ordinal scores, such as 1.5. Hence, we opted for the respondent as level 1. To test the robustness, we run the models also with the university mean value as level 1 (approximated to integer values), obtaining almost identical results.

  5. We crosschecked the results with the binary responses obtaining very similar findings. Results are available upon request.

  6. We use robust standard errors to account for potential heteroskedasticity problems.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the two reviewers for their very insightful comments. We are grateful to Eva Egron-Polak and Ross Hudson of the International Association of Universities (IAU) for making available the data of the internationalization survey; we also thank Michele Meoli, Kelvyn Jones, Rense Nieuwenhuis and Dimitri van Maele for discussing the statistical method, Michael Wise for carefully proofreading the manuscript, and members of the Centre for Higher Education Governance Ghent—especially Julie Birkholz—for their comments on an earlier version of the paper.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Ghent, Korte Meer 3, 9000, Ghent, Belgium

    Marco Seeber & Jeroen Huisman

  2. Department of Engineering, University of Bergamo, Via Pasubio 7b, 24044, Dalmine, BG, Italy

    Mattia Cattaneo & Stefano Paleari

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  1. Marco Seeber
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  2. Mattia Cattaneo
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Correspondence to Marco Seeber.

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Seeber, M., Cattaneo, M., Huisman, J. et al. Why do higher education institutions internationalize? An investigation of the multilevel determinants of internationalization rationales. High Educ 72, 685–702 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-015-9971-x

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