Webinar: Collaborative mergers and acquisitions in the higher education sector
Overview
UPDATE: A recording of the webinar can be viewed below:
The financial sustainability of the higher education sector remains a pressing challenge for higher education institutions. Pursuing mergers, acquisitions, or just sharing services, is increasingly seen as a viable option to support institutional stability. As a long-term strategy it can offer benefits, but also presents challenges that require strong leadership and clear planning.
On Tuesday 10 February, HEPI is hosting a webinar that will bring together a panel of speakers to examine collaborative mergers and acquisitions in HE. The webinar will explore different merger structures and their potential advantages and disadvantages, examine similar grouping models used in the US and consider experiences from the schools sector.
Speakers
Professor Diana Beech
Director of the Finsbury Institute, City St George’s, University of London
Alex Hall
General Counsel and Director of Governance and Legal Services, City St George’s, University of London
John Heniff
Principal, Huron Consulting Group
Sir Jon Coles
Chief Executive, United Learning
Rose Stephenson, Chair
Director of Policy and Strategy, HEPI
Register
To register your place and for further details please click here.
Comments
Jonathan Alltimes says:
As far as I can determine, City University gained very little, if anything, from the merger with St. George’s Hospital Medical School. The merger was therefore an economic expediency to stop the financial failure of the medical school. City University has considerable investments against which to draw down income for feeding cash flow. Obviously, donations have helped.
The talked about merger is Kent with Greenwich. Kent’s financial problems are long standing and go back to placing the campus away from a major centre of population, its weak transport links, and a lack of distinctiveness in its combination of academic specialisms at a time of industrial decline in the county: Templeman’s vision was misplaced and mistimed. There was a short-lived renaissance under Goodfellow when Kent pitched itself as the European university because of the opening of the Eurotunnel terminal at Ashford, but with the cap on student visas, the initial economic conditions and constraints have reasserted themselves. The common thread running from Sibson to Cox was the management behind the academic administrators and insufficient strategic and operational oversight of senior academic administrators for departments, so the university could not overcome its initial weaknesses. Greenwich itself is a nothing but a product of mergers forced on it by industrial decline. It has the advantage of being located within London and the prestigious campus of the former Royal Naval College.
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