With the recent announcement of the “first” university super merger between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent, I was reminded of this piece of work I wrote last February, which never got further than my hard drive (well cloud storage). I did write about writing them in a weeknote back then.

Anyhow, here is the vision I wrote about a future University Group, something that KPMG wrote about in their Radical Collaboration document for the UUK Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce and can be seen in the Greenwich and Kent merger.

Created by experts to inspire (and possibly scare) us into thinking about what a preferable future for higher education might look like.

All universities have their own personality, appeal, and brand. However not all universities need their own HR departments, or IT teams.

The first large university groups appeared following mergers forced by the regulator after financial pressures could have caused at least one higher education institution to fail.

The new group recognised that though in theory they should have a new name, they also realised that the existing names were brands in their own right. As a result they formed The University Group™ but the individual university names were kept. Staff were employed by The University Group™ but students attended a named university. It was so successful that some smaller institutions asked to join the group but retain their identity. What was important to the group was that management and staff recognised that they were employed by The University Group™ and not the named university in which they worked (though some teaching staff worked across the group), from a student experience perspective the student was a student of the named university. They would be awarded their degree from that named university and would to all intents and purposes be a graduate of that named university.

Support for the administrative and support functions was provided by group services. There was a single HR department for example, a single catering supplier for the group, IT services was provided by the group. Some group staff were based at each university campus to provide on-site support, but many professional services staff worked in a hybrid manner based in. regional hubs. This again reduced costs, through economics of scale, reduced office space. For those universities based in high cost city centres, reducing the amount of space for professional services, either increased teaching space capacity or reducing the university estate to further save costs.

The success of that first group in reducing costs and increasing student numbers encouraged others to not only reflect on joining the group, but for the regular to force through mergers across the country. We then started to see the first metropolitan universities appear, as well as the first regional groups.

Some universities decided to jump before they were pushed and so when a group of geographically dispersed universities merged to form a new super university group but retaining their individual identities the tide turned for the unique independent single university.

It wasn’t too long before the number of higher education organisations could be counted on the fingers of two hands, though the number of named universities actually increased, as the university groups de-regionalised some of their brands into local brands.

The university groups had better bargaining power and more influence in some markets. This also helped reduce costs across various services. With just a few higher education organisations the market for some specialised learning technologies was too small and many edtech businesses either dissolved or moved into other markets.