What are the motives for offering or engaging in higher education teacher trainingcourses? This question is of interest for educational developers, teachers, university managers,and policy makers in order to design courses and to meet stakeholders’expectations. Previousresearch has mainly focused on the impact of higher education development courses on teacherpractice and student learning. Few studies have investigated the motives behind these courses.In this paper, the motives are investigated among students, teachers, university management,and the government. The study is based on national and local documents on educationaldevelopment and on interviews with representatives from four Swedish universities. Theresults show that all stakeholder groups are in favour of compulsory courses but the motivesdiffer. Students, management, and government embrace an institutional perspective on educa-tional development, in line with a social efficiency perspective on the purposes of highereducation emphasising usefulness, function, and the production of skills. University teachers,on the other hand, have a more individual-oriented view on educational development and aremore oriented towards a learning-centred perspective.