The Dispatch
Mega, Super, Better
The word de jour is “merger”. Learn about its history and why it’s coming up in more higher ed conversations.
By Viggo Stacey
"“It takes a lot of internal naval gazing, machinations and disquiet to get to that point [of delivering better quality, lower cost and improved service]."
"“No existing two-institution merger would clearly provide a competitive advantage in research capacity that could not be achieved through other models such as research joint ventures or federation."
"To be honest, I suspect [mergers] would be a reasonable idea for many universities."
In Brief
- Higher education institutions worldwide are embracing mergers, from Australia to Korea, to boost global competitiveness, scientific strength, and financial viability in an increasingly oversaturated buyer's market.
- While mergers offer a path to stability amid dwindling public funds, experts debate if they are true collaborations or defensive takeovers focused primarily on stripping costs and downsizing.
- To succeed, institutional leaders must look beyond cost reduction and use consolidation as an opportunity to widen capabilities, protect jobs, and build solid financial foundations for the future.
The newly formed Adelaide University in South Australia is expected to contribute $4.7 billion to the Australian economy annually. Similarly, a new ‘super-university’ in the UK between University of Greenwich and the University of Kent is expected to “combine the strengths” of each institution.
Each will retain its name and identity, student bodies will increase and London and the South East of England will have “a powerful force”, leaders say.
Over in Kyrgyzstan, an announcement in early September stated that merging three institutions into the Kyrgyz National University would strengthen financial, human and scientific potential and enhance their competitiveness in the global education market.
In Korea, Changwon National University will merge with University of Gyeongnam Geochang and University of Gyeongnam Namhae to form a new institution from March 2026.
In a landscape where institutions are increasingly competing for motivated international students, talented researchers and academia burdened to maintain a competitive edge, institutional leaders are under pressure to stay ahead of the pack.
One easy assumption could be that more students mean more advocates, more impact, more funding, more research. Being part of a larger institution might also reduce the risk in what is increasingly seen as an oversaturated buyer’s market.
Talk to many in the sector now, they will tell you about the need for higher education to recalibrate, consolidate and strengthen collaboratively in order to build a stable foundation from which to grow.
Merging through time
Long before the frenzy of Adelaide’s new mega-university, Australia saw the Dawkins Revolution. A 1988 policy statement, published when John Dawkins was Education Minister, noted that universities could attract more industry support and involvement in research, offer students access to a wider range of study options and create savings by merging with Colleges of Advanced Education.
Consolidation “does not necessarily mean an amalgamation or total absorption of a smaller institution into a larger one”, it said. Affiliation or association to protect special institutional features are some of the “various arrangements [that] are possible”. But it concluded, a full amalgamation or merger “should be the preferred solution in most circumstances”.
Fast forward almost four decades to today and this policy could be one published by governments across the globe.
In Canada, provincial governments are said to be encouraging institutions to look at all sorts of tie-ups. The UK – which is about to see the release of its higher education whitepaper – already has the UUK’s Transformation and Efficiency Taskforce, giving an “all options on the table” approach to how UK institutions can partner and collaborate new models and ways of working.
New Zealand has experimented by merging all its polytechnics into one provider, Te Pukenga, only to be de-merged by the next government. The US, with its powerful private institutions, has seen at least 39 public and private mergers since March 2020, according to one analyst.
A stakeholder based in the US tells QS Insights Magazine, that consolidation is “the next big thing”, and something that has been in the making for the last three decades.
“It’s something that you hear about, but it never quite seems to happen. Generally, it’s usually an acquisition or an absorption rather than an arrangement of equals,” they say. “If you ask me, I think consolidation is long overdue and can be done in ways that preserve individual institutional identities.”
This is exactly what Greenwich and Kent in the UK will hope their ‘super-university’ will achieve.
The plan, announced in September, was promoted as a blueprint for other institutions to follow, with the London and South East University Group promising to be "resilient and financially viable" at a time of heightened financial challenges in the UK. Importantly, each institution will retain its brand, identity and local presence.
Others reframed the announcement as a takeover, not least of all University and College Union general secretary Jo Grady, who writes in a response article that leaders had failed to present a “clear and coherent strategy for how it will deal with the crisis in higher education”.
She emphasizes that university workers were feeling “overlooked, overworked, ignored, and undervalued”, calling for reassurances that jobs and student provision would be protected. This is one challenge for any university leaders to deal with.
But, what are the alternatives? A previous edition of QS Insights Magazine (issue 31, July 2025) warned that in 2024, at least 14 UK universities were ‘implementing redundancy programmes affecting arts degrees or closing creative courses’. Could mergers be a way to save some courses?
For many that QS Insights Magazine spoke with, much is yet to be seen and while mergers have the potential to deliver better quality, there is no guarantee.
“It takes a lot of internal naval gazing, machinations and disquiet to get to that point [of delivering better quality, lower cost and improved service],” according to one source.
When Victoria College merged with Deakin University in 1991, the Victoria name all but disappeared but there was still a question of merging cultures. One stakeholder who worked at the merged institution a decade later tells QS Insights Magazine that there was still some residual grumbling about the merger then, but that largely it’s now safe to say that the merger was successful.
How to succeed
Whether a merger succeeds depends a lot on why it is taking place, the circumstances and how the heavily bureaucratic institutions can come together effectively.
“Mergers driven by the need to cut costs will inevitably harm learners, researchers and society,” higher education expert, Nigel Healey, tells QS Insights Magazine.
“Forty years ago, mergers were seen as a way of building large comprehensive universities from smaller, discipline-specific institutions to meet the growing demand for higher education.
“Today, mergers are seen as a defensive strategy to strip out cost and downsize institutions to preserve their financial viability. The contrast between then and now could not be starker.”
Similar to provincial Canada, the state government in Western Australia has established a committee to undertake the cost-benefit analysis of university mergers, with indications that authorities could prefer two universities instead of the current four.
During a 2023 review in the state, University of Western Australia (UWA) suggested cross-sectoral mergers between universities and vocational education providers (VET) could “create a seamless transition through education pathways for domestic students”. Additionally, such mergers might widen access, promote opportunities for university students to participate in government-run VET providers, TAFE, and enhance pathways into the workforce.
However, UWA questioned whether a merged model could result in overall higher dollar funding than two institutions individually, and warned of a loss of top researchers and reputational damage. It also cautioned of PhD pipeline disruptions, as prospective international PhD students could choose to avoid institutional uncertainty.
“No existing two-institution merger would clearly provide a competitive advantage in research capacity that could not be achieved through other models such as research joint ventures or federation,” the institution noted.
And further evidence around benefits is somewhat limited. One 2018 research paper from the University of Huddersfield found that the efficiency of merged higher education institutions is around five percentage points higher post-merger than non-merging HEIs. However, the efficiency benefit does not last more than a year after the merger takes place, researchers found.
Others QS Insights Magazine spoke to emphasised the challenge of generalising about mergers.
“If government funding of HE continues to dwindle, then I think mergers become a necessary evil,” one commentator says. “I suppose the challenge is then in creating large institutions that lose their connection with local communities.
Asked if global higher education is consolidating, they are blunt.
“I think it has to,” they continue. “The big question will really be whether institutional leaders have the courage to start these conversations and follow them through, rather than put their heads in the sand and cross their fingers that government funding will be reinstated or that international students will still come in droves [despite government policy].”
Government policy in several study destinations, coupled with a system that has increasingly relied on international student fees as tax-payer funding has shrunk, has put institutions between a rock and a hard place. The National Tertiary Education Union in Australia noted that the 240,000 international student cap will cost the economy around $5.8 billion.
And yet politicians are happy to prop up other industries. In the UK, that may be the £1.5bn loan guarantee to carmaker Jaguar Land Rover the UK government recently committed to following a cyber-attack; in Australia, AUS$2.4 bn support for the Whyalla steelworks to support jobs after the owner went into administration; or the C$1.034bn bailout the government of Canada offered Canada Post in early 2025.
One person QS spoke with in Australia notes the higher education sector has lost more than a billion dollars annually since the Jobs Ready Graduates “debacle”.
The NTEU has also emphasized that the A$1.1 billion earmarked to implement the recommendations of the Universities Accord until 2029 is not enough to “properly address the deep problems in higher education” and has calculated that federal government funding for universities (excluding loan scheme, HELP) has fallen from 0.9 percent of GDP in 1995 to 0.6 percent of GDP in 2021.
Without dealing with underlying issues, there is no point merging institutions and destroying distinct cultures, this person says. Mergers are costly and destructive and only help if they are accompanied by significant resources and management improvements, they add.
So can a forced merger, driven by market forces and financial pressure, be successful?
It is exactly this query that merging universities will seek to confirm. The advantage for Kent and Greenwich is that they have a history of collaboration, operating the joint Medway School of Pharmacy since 2004. But questions still arise around what will happen to duplicate programmes.
“No-one at either the University of Kent or the University of Greenwich seriously thinks the merged ‘London and South East University Group’ is about anything other than cutting costs and jobs to stave off a financial crisis at the University of Kent,” Healey notes.
Another stakeholder says that for universities looking into mergers due to presently being unsustainable, “it might be a difficult process, but probably still better than any of the other alternatives”.
Alternatives to mergers, be that shared behind-the-scenes models and partnerships to allow for shared efforts and resources, are still likely to emerge, they suggest.
In its most recent report from September, UUK called for more shared services between institutions, such as the NHS Mental Health University Liaison Service that works with four institutions in the Welsh capital.
Almost everyone QS Insights Magazine spoke to emphasised the long history of merging and that mergers go far beyond the Adelaide and Kent & Greenwich hype. That might be the wave of mergers in South Africa in the early 2000s, the situation in Japan (see QS Insights Magazine issue 22, October 2024) or Korea driven by demographic shifts or reforms in Denmark in 2007 that saw the number of universities drop from 12 to eight. Between 2000-2015, the European Universities Association recorded 93 university mergers across the region.
Almost all were able to point to examples either at their own institutions or other significant changes that have shaped the higher education landscape in their respective countries.
Healey is not the only commentator to note that, after decades of steady growth, the higher education market in the UK is now saturated.
“As has already started to happen in many countries, the UK faces a period of consolidation, whether through the failure and closure of weaker universities (as is happening in the United States) or through forced mergers and downsizing (as in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan),” Healey concludes.
“To be honest, I suspect [mergers] would be a reasonable idea for many universities,” another commentator says.
“I do think it is a consolidating market for the bigger unis. It almost seems like physics. [That is] if there are too many big institutions in one orbit, it simply makes too much sense to [merge in some way].”
If mergers manage to effectively address multiple challenges – instil graduates with future-proof skills, widen the research and teaching capabilities while protecting jobs, and specialize in certain areas, while building a solid financial foundation for the future – they will not only be a necessary evil, but also an opportunity for higher education. The challenge is how to achieve all of that.