Doubts raised over US states’ plans to merge college systems

US states feeling forced by enrolment declines and budget constraints to consolidate their higher education operations are increasingly regarded as overlooking the greater value of running them more collaboratively.

The most recent example is New Hampshire, where the Republican governor, Chris Sununu, has proposed merging the four-campus University System of New Hampshire with the state’s seven community colleges.

Uniting them under a single board of trustees, and thereby saving the state about $5 million (£4 million) a year, was an “opportunity that can wait no longer”, the governor said.

But to outside experts, the governor’s presentation suggested that New Hampshire was just the latest US state to pursue the possibility of small budgetary savings without first mounting a strategic assessment of whether and how best to approach a consolidation.

The mistake seemed evident in the governor’s hope that he might trim a few percentage points off the $144 million that New Hampshire – already the nation’s worst funder of higher education – spends on its 11 public institutions, said Davis Jenkins, a state higher education specialist at Teachers College, Columbia University.

“The history of mergers and consolidations in higher ed is not very auspicious on that front,” said Dr Jenkins, who has been informally advising New Hampshire’s community colleges.

The handful of other states that have tried, Dr Jenkins said, were largely marked by cases such as Connecticut, where the community colleges now appear near collapse. After considering the costs of merging bureaucracies and cultures, consolidation “doesn’t really end up saving money”, he said.

Such moves appeared likely to spread across the US, said Anthony Carnevale, a research professor of public policy at Georgetown University. They also seemed especially ill-timed now, given the transition of political power in Washington, said Professor Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Those political changes, Professor Carnevale said, included President Biden’s pursuit of tuition-fee-free community colleges, the enactment by Congress of a $1.9 trillion Covid relief bill, the development of data systems that are helping students rank field-specific programmes regardless of institution type, and Mr Biden’s plans for a multitrillion-dollar investment in modernised transport and internet nationwide.

That infrastructure initiative holds out the promise of creating some 15 million new jobs, most of which will require the type of short-term training that postsecondary institutions of various types will compete to provide, he said.

“In theory, higher ed’s going to get a shot in the arm with this,” Professor Carnevale said.

Consolidations of public colleges and universities could help states respond to such opportunities, he said, but only if those consolidations were done with a clear focus on the needs of students and the workplace and not merely pushed ahead as an exercise in cost-cutting.

The best and perhaps only example of a consolidation done well in the US, Dr Jenkins said, was the state of Georgia. There, he said, state officials identified their economic strengths in areas that included film and finance, and distributed the appropriate programmes across a diverse set of institutions.

“They’re doing it in a very thoughtful way,” he said.

Without resorting to system-wide consolidations, Professor Carnevale said, community colleges in many US states were increasingly finding ways of using remote teaching technologies to help their students complete four-year degrees.

It’s part of an overall collapsing of boundaries between high schools, community colleges and four-year institutions. Covid “just jump-started a bunch of things that were going to happen”, he said.

paul.basken@timeshighereducation.com