<p>The neoliberal education policy encourages competition between universities through competitive funding. When adopting competitive funding, the state began to provide funding to private universities as well as national universities, and institutional mission differences blurred. Under this funding mechanism, universities began to develop their own strategies for dealing with the new funding mechanism. This study analyzes how universities in different institutional contexts adopt different response strategies to the competitive funding project in South Korea. This study found that universities, like other organizations, developed their own strategies to secure competitive funding. First, prestigious universities with high institutional capacity selectively responded to state funding projects while universities with a low status aggressively responded to competitive funding to bring in more funding from the state. Second, this study found that a university whose institutional capacity is in the ‘mid-range’ (higher than the aggressive strategy, but lower than the selective strategy) adopted hybrid and multiple response strategies. Finally, this study suggests that strategic response is a possible reason why the competitive funding policy has had insignificant effects in some universities but significant in others.</p>