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Over the past half century, the UK’s higher education landscape has been shaped to a great extent by university mergers and acquisitions. According to Lancaster University research, some 30% of higher education institutions went through the process between 1994-5 and 2009-10. This year will see a significant addition to the tally, when the University of London’s Institute of Education (IoE) surrenders its status as an independent institution to become the newest and largest faculty of University College London (UCL).
Many in academia believe that more mergers are on the way. In Here Be Dragons, PA Consulting’s higher education survey, 56% of the polled vice-chancellors feared “significant rationalisation through mergers or takeovers” in the next five to 10 years. So are mergers to be feared, or do the benefits of coming together outweigh the disadvantages?
That depends on the institutions, says professor Malcolm Tight, author of the Lancaster University study: “The majority I looked at were of much larger institutions taking over smaller, specialised ones, such as a fully-fledged university taking over a music or teacher training college. It can just become a new department, and that’s not much of an issue.”
Don’t underestimate the impact on morale
He believes that upheaval experienced by staff and its negative effects on morale should not be underestimated, and that this is magnified where bigger institutions come together: “There’s a tendency that the larger the organisation becomes, the more remote your ordinary member of staff will feel about any form of decision-making.”
Tight also queries the rationale most often put forward for mergers. “The driving force is often said to be saving money – the idea that you can make do with just one administration and trim the size of departments by bringing them together. But most of the evidence I’ve come across is that mergers cost more than they save.”
For clues as to how the challenges can be tackled, it’s worth looking to Wales. Here, the devolved Welsh government has pursued an aggressive reform agenda, with the recent creation of two “super universities” to cover the south of the country.
In December 2010, University of Wales Trinity Saint David was formed from University of Wales Lampeter and Trinity University College. Swansea Metropolitan University joined the new institution in 2012. To the east, the University of South Wales was created last year from the University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport. (The Welsh government backed down on plans to force a third partner, Cardiff Metropolitan University, to join.)
Mergers can offer benefits of scale
Huw Williams, deputy vice-chancellor at the University of South Wales, stresses that mergers are not “a panacea for all ills”.
“There need to be very clear advantages for going through such a challenging process,” he says. “For us, there were great benefits. A major one was scale: in Wales, we had a lot of small institutions, and scale gives you resilience in a volatile recruitment market.”
He puts forward a number of ways in which institutional disruption may be minimised. “Beforehand, it must be clear who is going to be chairman and vice-chancellor, and what the composition of the board will be. With us, there were lengthy discussions and then clarity over who would be leading – it was agreed that there would be one chairman for the first year, another chairman for the second year and then a normal appointment process thereafter.”
Williams cites communication across all levels of the organisation as vital in a scenario where staff numbers are being reduced. The South Wales merger meant reducing the head count by around 7-8% across the two parent universities.
“Fortunately, we have a very constructive relationship with our union reps. We were able to work with them to get the message out and ensure people were aware of things like voluntary severance arrangements, and also to deal constructively with individual cases where people thought they hadn’t been listened to,” he says.
But are we really set for a Welsh-style merry-go-round of mergers over the coming years? Tight says: “It may continue, as long as there are small, specialist institutions willing to be gobbled up, but I don’t see any great call outside Wales for mergers between universities of similar size. That simply doesn’t happen very often. And there’s no evidence of predatory mergers, like in the commercial sector – where companies seek to swallow up competitors.”
Mike Boxall, higher education expert at PA Consulting Group, cautions against making across-the-board predictions. “The history of the whole higher education sector is one of continuous mergers of different size and scale,” he says. “Almost every instance you see is unique – there’s not necessarily a sector-wide pattern.
“Take the UCL-IoE one. They’ve been very close for years, with shared services and their strategic partnership. It has a logic of its own, because UCL doesn’t have a school of education and IoE has been vulnerable as a monotechnic in a particularly difficult sector. So the times make it a good thing to do.”
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