We report a research about the relation among regulative patterns concerned to High Education quality standards, interpretive schemes and strategic responses in private High Education Organizations (IES) in São Paulo State, Brazil. This is a comparative study of cases. Data were collected by questionaries and interviews with managers of High Education Organizations based on São Paulo State, Brazil. We used content and multivariate techniques as strategy for analysing data. Based on those techniques, our results suggest that legal standards of educational quality enforced by Brazilian Government from 1995 to 2003 were institutionalized in two senses in those IES. In a first group of IES those standards were perceived mainly as a source of efficiency (to follow those requirements was reported as necessary to offer good education); in a second group the requirements were perceived only as a source of legitimacy (a way of avoiding to be punished by Government and society). We conclude that institutionalization in those cases should be understood as a complex phenomenon affecting organizational behaviors and their symbolic systems in different ways. That suggests that to understand institutionalization processes it is not enough to focus on observable environment patterns.