Why Higher Education Institutions internationalize? An investigation of the multilevel determinants of internationalization rationales.

n recent decades internationalization has risen to prominence in higher edu-cation institutions (HEIs). Scholars have identified several rationales for internationaliza-tion. There is however a lack of conceptual understanding and empirical evidence forwhich rationale(s) for internationalization are chosen by a given HEI and why. The goal ofthis article is to fill this gap. We develop and test a conceptual framework to predict thesalience of a given rationale for a specific HEI. The framework integrates factors atmultiple levels, namely competitive and institutional forces in the global and nationalcontexts, the organizational goals and the influence of internal actors. The empiricalanalysis employs information on more than 400 European HEIs from two large datasets ontheir organizational characteristics and from a large-scale survey on internationalization ofuniversities. The findings show that the HEIs embedded in a global context more fre-quently conceive internationalization as an instrumental to prestige. The national contextsdo not greatly affect HEIs' rationales, and the amount of res.ources is less important thanthe competition for resources. Organizational goals as well as the influence of students,faculty members and middle managers on the internationalization process partly predict theprominence of specific rationales. The paper closes discussing the findings and theimplication for scholarly research

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