Sino-foreign cooperative education has emerged as a unique institutional form within higher education institutions in China. It functions with both traditional undergraduate programs and has different ideas of organizational logic. Combining the concept of institutional logics with the concept of capital in the sense of Bourdieu and with sociological approaches to institutional legitimacy, this paper compares the configurations of the enrollment-cultivation-employment (ECE) chain of these two educational models. Based on a comparative case study design of a Sino-foreign cooperative undergraduate program (ECE) and a traditional non-cooperative undergraduate program, especially focusing on the Process Equipment and Control Engineering program in a Joint International Institute at a national key university in Northeastern China as an example, the logics of state, market, academic, and transnational are identified as differently shaping each stage of the ECE chain. Results show that Sino-foreign cooperative programs are mostly market- and transnational-logic oriented and feature enrollment as a way of getting access to internationally oriented education, cultivation as the making of globally competent graduates, and employment as the proof of value added by the education pathway. In contrast, traditional programs are state- and academic-logic-driven programs that emphasize state-coordinated allocation, disciplinary depth, and domestic institutional legitimacy. Building on these empirical findings, the paper moves into more theoretical macro-level reflections on educational equity, the “internationalization at home” paradigm, and the balance between the import of global STEM resources and the fit with national higher education goals. This paper makes two main contributions to institutional logics theory: extending its use to the context of cross-border higher education and integrating the theory with institutional complexity, as well as adding the multidimensional ECE chain as an analytical tool to study institutional logics in practice.