I had planned to publish this, as the first of my vision pieces, following the UUK Annual Conference last week, but my timetable was scuppered with the announcement of the “first” university super merger between the University of Greenwich and the University of Kent. So I did publish a vision piece on The University Group™.

So, what was going to be that first vision? Well last week was the UUK Annual Conference and I was able to attend as I had worked on strand 2 of the UUK Transformation & Efficiency Taskforce. On the second day, the then science secretary Peter Kyle was speaking and calling for increasing specialisation and collaboration in higher education.

There are “too many universities competing for the same pool of students”, according to science secretary Peter Kyle. Speaking to reporters at Universities UK conference, Kyle argued that said volume of universities was coming at the “expense of playing to their relative strengths or truly specialising to become the go-to authority in their field rather than a bit player in many.” 

I was reminded of this piece of work I wrote last February, which never got further than my hard drive (well cloud storage) on the specialist university.

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

What might it mean for the operations of a university if the focus of the student experience became more specialised? How would and how could the sector respond to change in how students accessed higher education. What would this mean for individual institutions?

Though there have been many specialist higher education institutions, they have generally being outnumbered by the more traditional general university offering a portfolio of courses across multiple subjects. 

Universities currently offer a broad range of programs and modules for graduates and postgraduates what we could see happening in future as university specialising in one or two particular areas, and then having all the students in the area attend that specific university, so you no longer would have the university of a particular city; you would have the university of business university of law, the university of biology, the university of aeronautical engineering.

The cost of providing some subjects became prohibitive and many universities recognising that economies of scale would be more cost-effective took the decision to specialise in a few core areas. They decided to specialise and provide high-quality, specialised education locations in their chosen, subject field and research. However though they narrowed down their breadth of delivery, they were able to use technology to widen their offer to the whole of the UK and in some cases internationally as well. 

As the reputation of these institutions grew, those universities who had decided to retain a broad curriculum, found that both domestic and international student recruitment was falling, and it was becoming more difficult to recruit and retain staff.

The specialist institutions soon outnumbered the traditional university by student numbers. These institutions were large enough to provide their own student services, professional services and even multiple campus hubs across the UK.

In addition to these large specialist institutions, there was also a large number of small institutions focusing on very specialist curriculum and research areas. However they did not have the capacity or capability to deliver the student and professional services they required. As a result they bought in these services from service companies, or in some cases they collaborated with other specialist institutions to deliver shared services in a range of areas. This enabled the specialist institutions to focus on teaching and research. They used third parties for professional services such as IT, HR, payroll, student records and others. 

There was also collaboration in other areas, especially in student facing services such as the library, student support, healthcare, and academic support.

Some specialist institutions also partnered with relevant industry partners, with the industry partner providing the business support for the university.