Vol.:(0123456789) Higher Education https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-023-01002-2 1 3 Organisational legitimacy of private providers: Regulators’ ratings and perspectives Wondwosen Tamrat 1  · Damtew Teferra 2 Accepted: 19 January 2023 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 Abstract This study was conducted to gauge the nature and level of organizational legitimacy of private higher education institutions (PHEIs) in Ethiopia through the perspectives of regu- lators involved in accrediting and auditing private institutions. The study adopted a mixed- methods approach, particularly the explanatory sequential design, and used questionnaire, documentary evidence, and interview as principal means of data collection. One hundred and twenty-one regulators were involved in the survey and ten regulators participated in the in-depth interview. The fndings revealed that both the overall rating of PHEIs and the various categories of legitimacy identifed as procedural, consequential, structural, per- sonal, and linkage received average ratings by regulators. This denotes a threshold level of acceptance suggesting the need for a more substantial legitimacy level that the Ethiopian private higher education sector should attain if it seeks to earn heightened credibility and active support from stakeholders. Conclusions and implications of the study at the nexus of theory, policy, and practice are discussed. Keywords Organizational legitimacy · Legitimacy · Regulators · Private higher education · Legitimacy threshold Introduction Consideration of educational institutions as organizations runs across the whole gamut of institutional theories on which this study is based. Scott (2003: 11) defnes organiza- tions as “social structures created by individuals to support the collaborative pursuit of specifed goals.” While the purpose of an organization is accomplishing collective goals, its nature requires the presence of certain components such as “a set of social actors or participants, a social structure by which they interrelate goals or a mission, and a set of technologies or tasks it performs in order to render inputs into desired outputs” * Wondwosen Tamrat wondwosentamrat@gmail.com; wondwosentamrat@smuc.edu.et Damtew Teferra teferra@ukzn.ac.za 1 School of Graduate Studies, St. Mary’s University, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 2 University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa