There’s a quiet change taking place in British higher education. On the evening news, there are no dramatic resignations or closed gates. Just a steady stream of announcements, each one a bit more unexpected than the last. King’s College London is partnering with Cranfield. A year ago, no one had heard of Kent merging with Greenwich under a regional banner. According to a recent Universities UK survey, two out of five institutions are willing to follow suit. Right now, the atmosphere in any senior common room in England is more akin to quiet calculation than ambition.
The figures that support it are not encouraging. Although welcomed, the recent increase in tuition fees hasn’t made up for the estimated 40% of English universities that are in financial deficit. Ninety-two percent of English and Welsh institutions informed UUK that the fee increase would not be sufficient to cover the costs of upcoming policy changes. The national insurance premiums are steep. Once the quiet subsidy that kept departments afloat, the number of international students has fluctuated. In other words, the bursar’s spreadsheet is no longer working.
The tension is evident in the little decisions. There is a delay in repairs. hiring freezes that continue into their second or third year. Hardship funds were reduced, and bursaries were cut. A startling statistic considering that research is purportedly the catalyst for national development is that nearly a third of universities have reduced academic research activity, up from 14% only two years ago. On some campuses, the buildings that were the architectural highlight of the prospectus twenty years ago have peeling paint. It has a sense of exhaustion.
In light of this, the merger discussion begins to make more sense. A single institution with nearly 50,000 students spread across London, Medway, and Canterbury will be created by the Kent-Greenwich partnership, which was announced last fall and is scheduled to go into effect this year. It was referred to by officials as the nation’s first “super-university.” With Kent on the verge of bankruptcy, the University and College Union referred to it more bluntly as a takeover. Both may be accurate. That’s one of the things that makes reading this moment uncomfortable.
The King’s-Cranfield announcement earlier this year might be the more significant one. There is no obvious distress at either institution. Cranfield is a specialized powerhouse in the aerospace and defense industries, while King’s is a worldwide brand. Two universities picking each other for reasons other than survival suggests something the industry hasn’t quite acknowledged publicly: scale may now be more important than tradition in terms of research funding and international recruitment. There’s a feeling that the centuries-old map of higher education in Britain is being subtly redrawn in boardrooms.
That’s not how everyone in the industry wants to discuss it. Mergers are messy. Cultures collide. Employees are concerned about which department will lose its name on the door and which campus will lose its library. Vivienne Stern of UUK has taken care to present all of this as innovative problem-solving, advocating for VAT flexibility and a Transformation Fund to assist institutions in restructuring without bleeding out. It’s another matter entirely whether the government will pay attention, given its own financial difficulties.
As this develops, it’s difficult to ignore the similarities to local councils or hospital trusts ten years ago, both of which consolidated due to financial strain and were assured that the change would strengthen them. It did occasionally. Sometimes it simply meant fewer buildings with fewer signs. That same waiting room now houses the British university, that peculiar cross between medieval heritage and contemporary business. It’s hard to predict what will leave.
