Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether the Malaysian private universities’ international efforts adhere
to the general approach to internationalization and to explore the degree of perceived importance and perceived
implementation those efforts at institutional level. By integrating several models and frameworks proposed by
scholars in internationalization domain such as Knight and Zha, the paper presents a conceptual framework
comprising preliminary factors, strategy factors and process factors of internationalization at universities.
Instrument developed for these factors were tested on 204 academics from 10 Malaysian private universities to
analyze their perceived importance and perceived implementation. Based on an overview of all factors, it is
found that the average mean values of factors that perceived as important are higher than the values accounted
for the perceived degree of implementation of internationalization at Malaysian private universities. The study
extends the scope of the internationalization literature on an emerging market context and probably one of the
first to conduct empirical tests/structured questionnaire in assessing internationalization issues in the context of
the Malaysian private university sector. The study traced internationalization efforts of Malaysian private
universities which provide practitioners with more evidence of the value of internationalization. The conceptual
framework exemplified in this study is considered the most significant contribution of this research work in
terms of providing measurement tools for evaluation and assessment of internationalization efforts in the higher
education domain.

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