By   John Hanc – New York Times

Think of it as an arranged marriage.

That’s the analogy used by   Patrick McCay, a professor at what was until recently the   New Hampshire Institute of Art, to describe what a merger in higher education is like for those involved.

“As in an arranged marriage, there’s not much time for the faculty and staff to ‘date,’” said Professor McCay, whose 121-year-old institute completed its merger with larger   New England College in the summer. “It only happens after the appropriate parental authorities have negotiated the legal and financial aspects. And the two individuals then have to hope that their personalities will mesh.”

Or in this case, that the cultures of two very different institutions will result in a harmonious union.

One, New England College, is on 220 acres in rural   Henniker, N.H. A river flows through the campus, and a nearby covered bridge adds to the Rockwellian tableaux.

The other, the now-renamed   Institute of Art and Design at New England College, is based about 30 miles away, in six renovated historic buildings in downtown   Manchester. (“Gritty,” is how Professor McCay describes it).

The arrangement seems to have worked so far (for one thing, enrollment is up at both campuses of the newly merged institute), in part because this one checks most of the boxes that experts say can predict success.

“People say you’ve seen one merger, you’ve seen one merger,” said   Dr. Ricardo Azziz,   chief officer of Academic Health and Hospital Affairs for the State University of New York and co-author of the book,   “Strategic Mergers in Higher Education.”   “But when you study the successful ones, you find commonalities.”

He added that Professor McCay’s comparison to an arranged marriage is an apt one. “Higher ed is different than a business,” Dr. Azziz said. “We are a community of scholars who come together under an umbrella organization to do our work. The job of most leaders of mergers is to create a new culture from two, regardless of whether one is dominant or not.”

In the case of the two New Hampshire schools, the dominant partner was New England College. It had over 2,700 students and growing programs in various majors at the time merger plans were announced in May 2018, while enrollment in the Institute of Art was about 300, and had been declining.

The Institute of Art’s urban campus and well-regarded arts programs were attractive to the larger school, but New England College wanted to maintain the institute’s culture as well as its location.

“It’s really important in a merger to be committed to preserving the essence and positive characteristic of the institution that’s being acquired,” said   Michele Perkins, president of New England College. “It shouldn’t be a dissolving of that institution but an enhancement.”

It’s an enhancement that many institutes of higher learning have turned to in recent years. Since 2000, more than 100 American colleges and universities have merged, according to data compiled in the strategic mergers book.

And yet, “for years, no one wanted to talk about it, ”said   Guilbert C. Hentschke, the   Richard T. Cooper and Mary Catherine Cooper Chair in Public School Administration at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education and a co-author of the merger book. In higher education, as opposed to the corporate world, “merging was seen as synonymous with failure or a death wish,” he said.

Given the challenges, American colleges and universities are facing — and the growing number of high-profile closures the past few years — that view is changing. “I’d rather have two institutions merge than see one fail,” said   Henry Stoever,   president and chief executive of the   Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges.

More college boards and presidents seem to agree with that. “It’s now seen as an acceptable strategy,” said Dr. Hentschke who was also the co-author of a   2017 TIAA Institute report on college mergers.

He cites a number of other recent mergers that have worked. Some are between larger and smaller schools — for example,   Boston University’s 2017 acquisition of Wheelock, a small private liberal arts college in Boston that focused on education, social work and family studies, resulted in B.U.’s   Wheelock College of Education and Human Development, a school within the university.

Others are between undergraduate and graduate institutions, such as   Clarkson University’s 2016 merger with Union Graduate College   to create Clarkson’s new   Capital Region Campus in Schenectady, N.Y.

One of the largest mergers was the nearly-decade-long series of consolidations by the state of Georgia between schools in its parallel systems — the University System of Georgia and the Technical College System of Georgia — which reduced the number of institutions from 35 in 2011 to 26 today.

Dr. Azziz presided over the amalgamation between what were Georgia Health Sciences University and Augusta State University. He said the process was “very complicated,” and that is evident simply in the name of the merged institution. It was first called   Georgia Regents University, and then (when the city of Augusta objected to being deleted) became   Georgia Regents University Augusta, and finally, in 2015 — after a lawsuit from Regent University in Virginia — changed to Augusta University.

One lesson learned, Dr. Azziz said, was “don’t try and rename an institution by popular vote.”

The TIAA Institute report concluded that despite the benefits, the merger process “is nearly always painful and costly.” Given that harsh reality, how should they be judged? By the growth of the merged organization, Dr. Hentschke says, the continued identity of the “merged” institution and the creation of new synergies or programs that benefit students.

The efficiencies achieved when two organizations combine — factors that might be considered part of the metric in a corporate merger — are not such a high priority here he adds. “There are few ‘attaboys’ for being efficient in higher education mergers, but many for ‘new,’ ‘more’ and ‘better,’” he said.

When Purdue University in 2017 acquired Kaplan Inc., a for-profit institute, it appeared that Purdue was getting something new, bigger and better by adding Kaplan’s large online education infrastructure. But not everyone was eager to celebrate that particular marriage.

Purdue faculty members and their union, the Indiana Conference of the American Association of University Professors, were highly critical of the merger, citing in part what they saw as a   lack of faculty input or transparency in the merger.

The TIAA Institute report recommends a “robust and redundant communication plan” as key to any successful merger. Dr. Perkins said that communication with and involvement by students, staff, and faculty was critical during the merger process.

“We had many meetings in Manchester and Henniker that involved the entire community,” she said. “We wanted to share as much information as we could during the process so that no one was surprised.”

Professor McCay, who has taught drawing and painting at the art institute for 16 years, thinks that, on balance, the administration’s efforts have paid off.

“They’ve overcome a lot of fears and insecurities and faculty egos,” he said. “It’s going to take time to know if this marriage is going to work. But so far, five weeks into our first semester together, we’re feeling good, no one’s calling a marriage counselor and we’re moving forward.”