International Alliances and Research Agreements
In business, companies strive to increase market share; in higher education, institutions compete for prestige. This is why, despite whatever your told by people in universities, rankings are catnip to university administrations: by codifying prestige, they give institutions actual benchmarks against which they can measure themselves. But prestige is actually much harder to amass than market share. Markets can increase in size; prestige is a zero-sum affair (my prestige is related directly to your lack thereof). And universities have fewer