University Reputation as a Signal of Territorial Attractiveness: A Mixed-Methods Look at Morocco's Higher Education System, from National Patterns to Local Specificities

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Does a university's standing rub off on the place that hosts it? Most of what we know about that question comes from North America and Western Europe, where reputation is already built into how regions sell themselves. Morocco offers something different: a system that has expanded fast, holds real reputational capital, and has almost no machinery for converting it into territorial positioning. We address that gap with the URTAS-Morocco framework (University Reputation-Territorial Attractiveness through Signaling), which stops treating reputation as a single score and breaks it into four signals stakeholders read separately — academic legitimacy, economic embeddedness, social visibility, and symbolic differentiation. By looking past the metropolitan cases to include a secondary coastal city, we show these mechanisms hold everywhere but change shape depending on where you stand.

Methodological approach: A convergent mixed-methods design. We began inductively, with the Gioia methodology, so that the mechanisms linking reputation to attractiveness would emerge from what stakeholders actually said rather than from categories set in advance. A confirmatory phase then tested the resulting model through structural equation modeling.

Sample: Eight focus groups and forty-two semi-structured interviews with four stakeholder groups across seven Moroccan university cities, followed by a national survey of 1,240 respondents.

Main conclusion: The four signals appear everywhere, but never in quite the same shape twice: metropolitan hubs lean on research intensity and international partnerships, secondary and coastal cities on applied training, industrial anchoring, and civic proximity. University reputational capital shapes territorial attractiveness perception along two pathways, institutional confidence (β = 0.39) and knowledge ecosystem signaling (β = 0.21), which with a residual direct effect (β = 0.14) account for 41.3% of the variance (R² = 0.413). One gap runs through all seven sites: universities rarely turn their reputational assets into deliberate territorial branding. Territorial context does not dilute the power of university reputation, it decides what form that power takes.

Keywords

university reputation; territorial attractiveness; place branding; signaling theory; Gioia methodology.