For someone who makes a career out of having a relatively good understanding of what is going on in higher education and then telling people what I think I may have been wrong about mergers.
My starting premise has been that aside from very few cases where there was a direct geographical match, shared missions, or financial collapse, mergers would remain a relatively minor part of the higher education landscape. They just seem very expensive, very time consuming, and the regulatory environment is not amenable to grand collaborations.
Clearly, they have the great potential to shape the world through new sizes, strengths and configurations but higher education is often more practical than that. It is the messy and formless world of process alignment, regulation, systems, and the people forced to deal with these things. It’s not that there aren’t capabilities to merge providers, it’s just that they are obviously very hard.
Anyway, it turns out that in the case of King’s College London and Cranfield that geography or even being similar providers is absolutely no impediment whatsoever to announcing a merger
Places
At their combined scale the merged entity will have a significant geographic footprint, a varied stream of research funding, and a staff team of even greater expertise. It is the fact that on paper the providers are so different that the whole thing seems to make sense.
And KCL and Cranfield are genuinely very different institutions. Cranfield is postgraduate focussed around a specific basket of strengths in technology, aerospace, defence and management amongst other areas. KCL is an enormous comprehensive institution. In a world where there is a government push for specialism KCL will acquire some new ones.
It’s never been clear how on the one hand providers can specialise in their education provision, as the Post-16 education and skills white paper promotes, while simultaneously having a more expansive economic offer in skills, mission alignment, and growth, as the Industrial Strategy promotes. However, their differences meet different parts of the government’s agendas for education and the wider economy. It will be a bigger provider while maintaining a distinct purpose.
Cranfield’s vice chancellor has said to the BBC “We don’t anticipate job losses – the merger is not predicated on job losses, so people should feel secure in that”. If people do remain in post and the providers different assets are maintained there is a path to imagining a bigger offer which precisely because of different geographies and portfolios can genuinely have a greater national role. It is the combination of two universities but it is also the reconciliation of comprehensive and specialist education.
There therefore seems a genuine focus on maintaining the expertise of the institution. Both providers frame the merger about the opportunity to bring the assets of KCL and Cranfield together to grow impact, consolidate expertise, and contribute to the country’s national security and resilience. As Lord Vallance has pointed out this is also gives KCL a presence “at the heart of one of our most important regions for science and technology.” Yes, it does, in the sense that Cranfield is equidistant between Oxford and Cambridge. It is also the case that it’s already much quicker to travel on public transport between KCL and Oxford and Cambridge than it is to either of those destinations from Cranfield.
It is also the case that a stronger connection to the UK’s biggest market gives an enormous boost to Bedfordshire. The geographic argument for the merger is interesting because they’re not exactly neighbours but their economic geography overlaps. There isn’t a shared political geography either. However, there is a shared opportunity to create new economic geographies through combining assets.
London, Bedfordshire and the world
It is great to have grand plans but the moral mission for the country eventually meets a reality of organisation incentives. There are lots of reasons to merge some of which are the industry and government partnerships that KCL’s Vice Chancellor is optimistic they will bring. The other is that it gives KCL access to a range of assets it could not easily recreate. Not to be too instrumental about these things but it’s easier to merge with a world-leading business school, a leader in defence, a world expert in aerospace, and a acquire a set of relationships with the Ministry of Defence, than it is to recreate them.
Ironically, it is also easier to do specialisation within a comprehensive framework. In reading Cranfield’s accounts their financial risks are fairly obvious. They teach specialist programmes, to postgraduate cohorts, and rely on international student fee income. A provider the scale of KCL can smooth out the variability of their income between years while derisking some of their own income lines through building new partnerships with likes of the MoD. The comprehensive approach of KCL derisks the narrow but deep funding of Cranfield. The specific funding of Cranfield opens up new markets to KCL.
National capabilities
There’s been a lot of online discussion on the nature of this merger particularly whether it’s more like an acquisition. The initial releases by the universities firmly suggest this is Cranfield trading governance autonomy by being absorbed by KCL to extend and preserve its unique mission, purpose, and assets.
The challenge is therefore not only about whether providers can sustainability specialise but whether this can be delicately maintained when the incentives mediate against it. Fundamentally, there are few better examples of alignment to government agendas than Cranfield. A specialised institution with an enviable research record with partnerships into government while projecting not only the UK’s soft power but its hard power abroad. It is the My Imaginary University of what the government say they want.
The government might therefore think of not only how do they cause mergers to happen but what is the post-merger architecture they are putting in place to maintain the kinds of national capacity they say is important. We don’t know how the future of these organisations will pan out but slowly the pictures of the kinds of mergers that can happen moves into view. The question for government is whether they are happy for this to happen under its own steam or whether they see now (once this current fire is out) as the opportunity to create more amenable conditions for more of this work to happen.
