8 February 2018Times Higher Education 13NEWS
2018
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Management and governance
‘Surge’ in European
mergers as
universities seek
rankings boost
There has been a “surge” of uni-
versity mergers in order to climb
global university rankings, accord-
ing to a new analysis of European
tie-ups.
But bigger does not necessarily
mean better, one of the authors of
the new report has warned, because
merged institutions can take years
to bed in and risk creating “cumber-
some” management structures.
Mergers used to have the aim of
shoring up the finances of weaker
institutions, explained Pedro Teix-
eira, director of the Centre for
Research in Higher Education Pol-
icies at the University of Porto, and
one of the report’s authors. Now,
however, they are increasingly done
to create “international visibility”,
he said.
A recent example is the Univer-
sity of Paris-Saclay, a mega-campus
on the outskirts of the French cap-
ital that will combine more than a
dozen institutions, in part to try to
break into the top 20 of the Aca-
demic Ranking of World Universi-
ties, which is often known as the
Shanghai ranking.
Although the tie-up will not
include as many institutions as had
once been hoped, the country’s
president, Emmanuel Macron, has
backed the merger as a way for the
component universities to “distin-
guish themselves” in global rank-
ings, which are “highly consulted
by foreign students”. The merger is
being supported by a multibillion-
euro extension of the Paris Metro.
Aalto University in Helsinki is
another example, Professor Teixeira
said, having been created in 2008
out of a technical university, a busi-
ness school and an arts school. “The
government promised to give them
significant additional funding,”
with the explicit goal of building a
higher-ranked “flagship” institu-
tion, he explained.
Policymakers had come to believe
that “competition is good”, and thus
they often supported such tie-ups, he
said. Global rankings also helped to
break down a tradition of non-com-
petition between universities, Profes-
sor Teixeira continued.
Those working in universities
“feel less comfortable in rejecting
the idea of competition” and arenow rebadging some types of fund-
ing as competitive, he said.
But in some cases, he added,
climbing the rankings had become
a “justification” that allowed insti-
tutions to take decisions that they
had been wanting to take anyway- such as increasing their focus on
research or attracting more students
and staff from overseas.
The analysis, “Mergers in Euro-
pean Higher Education: Financial
Issues and Multiple Rationales”,
which was published inHigher Edu-
cation Policy, was conducted with
the European University Associ-
ation and is based on surveys of
presidents and rectors across the
Continent. It concludes that it is too
early to tell how successful many of
these tie-ups have been. When busi-
nesses merge, it normally takes at
least a decade to “consolidate” the
union, Professor Teixeira said.
Mergers can create beneficial
“economies of scale”, he said. But
they also risked erecting “cumber-
some” management structures that
rendered them less efficient than the
separate constituent institutions, he
warned. Simply putting together
more students, staff and money
“doesn’t guarantee that the result
will be more than the sum of the
parts”, he said.
Most of the world’s top-ranked
universities are “not very large insti-
tutions. That’s one of the warnings
for these merger processes.” Profes-
sor Teixeira also observed that pol-
icymakers often “take for granted
that bigger is better. It’s not clear
that if you want to have an elite
institution...you should have a large
institution.”
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