A key policy challenge in establishing new universities is the potential risk of lower academic standards and mission drift, which can affect policy effectiveness and outcomes. While regulation and funding tend to be preferred policy instruments for securing control of higher education expansion and achieving policy objectives, this article reports on a nation-wide reform in which various forms of legitimacy and control were actively used as measures in the design and establishment of almost one hundred new elite universities - the Institutes of National Importance (INIs) - in India. Our theoretical framework is based on the need for reinvention in policy design in higher education, that is based on the possible cross-fertilisation between the field of public administration and organisational theory. Through a mixed-method research design that included archival documents related to higher education reform and case studies of seven new INIs, this article demonstrates how 'soft instruments' based on legitimacy may align public policy objectives and stakeholder expectations ensuring quality and mission sustainability of new universities. We suggest that institutional and instrumental dimensions related to legitimacy and control can be integrated into a joint theoretical framework for policy implementation in higher education. We inform higher education policy by uncovering a range of legitimacy-based policy options in higher education, including the significance of reputation, national classification schemes, and organisational archetypes, that can be operationalised to minimise mission divergence.