The Best Time to Merge: Before ‘No One Wants You’

For Ricardo Azziz, preparing a manual on how to merge two academic institutions began in 2012 when he and several other campus leaders in Georgia were asked to manage a series of consolidations and, he says, “we all looked around for our resources and our how-to manual, and we found none.”

“That’s what prompted us, once the dust settled, and we had learned lots of lessons — some of them the hard way — to write the book,” says Azziz, a research professor of health policy, management, and behavior at the University at Albany, part of the State University of New York, who will also become chief executive of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine in January.

In Strategic Mergers in Higher Education (Johns Hopkins University Press), he and three colleagues canvass available research, including their own, on higher-education mergers and explain why and how mergers do or should occur, and what determines their outcomes, good and bad. They detail strategies for a variety of mergers, from partial ones involving programs or divisions to total ones in which a new institution replaces two that cease to exist.

Azziz led the merger that in 2013 created Georgia Regents University (renamed Augusta University in 2015). Because amalgamations change institutions in profound ways, they often create wounds and leave scars, as resistance from some stakeholders is invariably formidable, the authors write. Resistance may come in the form of objections that no college should have to merge because “higher education is not a business — it should be supported by society and government.”

The authors assert that colleges must become more “nimble” to ensure their financial security. That may mean borrowing from business-world rationales for innovation, particularly as higher education undergoes rapid change in student demographics, technology, communications, funding bases, and much else.

In an interview, Azziz estimates that about 30 percent of American higher-education institutions probably should merge. That’s far more than the estimated 12 percent of chief business officers who reported in a 2017 survey by Inside Higher Ed that senior administrators have had serious internal discussions about merging.

Azziz, an expert in reproductive medicine, says mergers would ideally involve carefully hatched plans, not desperation. Among the authors’ cautions is: Pitch the merger vision clearly to all constituencies, and renew the pitch over and over.

Say, for example, “We’ll create new traditions, together,” Azziz says. And make the pitch particularly cogently to trustees, lest they give in to the inevitable pressure not to proceed.

The best pitch, he says, should emphasize students: “We often tend to think about how complex mergers are around faculty cultures and administrations and jobs and all those kinds of things, but at the end of the day, we’re trying to produce and prepare a better product and a better-quality experience for our students.”

As for desperation, Azziz says: “It’s too late to look for mergers when you’re in extremis, when you are so devoid of financial resources, reputational assets, branding, or students, that now no one wants you.”

He even argues that contingency planning around a merger is part of college leaders’ due diligence. “That doesn’t mean you have to do it. Just have it in your strategic planning.”

Is seeking an unforced merger as an approach to growth too big a risk, and too overwhelming a task? “It’s hard, and it’s costly,” Azziz concedes. But, after surveying such mergers in the United States and other countries, he says, “The results more frequently than not are very positive.”