What happens if your university shuts (or merges)?

[NeverDropYourMorayCup]

There's a lot of talk about potential university mergers or even failures - which makes me wonder what happens to current, past and future students if a uni does close? Anyone seen this play out in another country? I would guess the current students would be hardest hit - even if merging with another institution there would be no guarantee that their course would still run. Graduates might find it tricky also as how would employers verify the authenticity of their degree qualification? If you lost a certificate or if an employer or a postgrad course entry wanted an academic reference or breakdown of your grades you'd be stuck.

This happened when I was at uni in 1996. Our college was taken over by another uni and our degree was awarded by them. I don't remember anything happening to the courses or the students - everything continued as normal. They probably discontinued courses after the current cohort completed them, but nothing was cancelled midway.

@Nix32 the same happened to a HE college in my town which got absorbed into a Uni.

However, I don't think the current situation is comparable. We're talking about a larger Uni of maybe 10,000 students going bankrupt - which is not beyond the realms of possibility at the moment. Truth is, it's never happened. So we simply don't know how it would pan out. I'm guessing the Government would have to step in and implement some kind of emergency plan. But undoubtedly students degrees would be interrupted - even if temporarily.

Agree the current difficulties are new. The government could try to force some kind of met

It's happened with teaching colleges in the past but it doesn't compare to the size of universities.

Gah sorry

Some kind of merger/takeover but it wouldn't be an attractive prospect.

There would also be issues during the struggling phase. Staff cuts and redundancies might result in modules being cut, less choice for students. Degrees being cut are likely to see existing students through but with minimal staff. Not good.

This is a really interesting question. I work in a city with a big, successful RG uni a few miles outside the city centre that’s bursting at the seams, and a small ‘new’ university that has seen numbers decline year on year to the point where it’s not much bigger than an FE college.

The small uni has some beautiful buildings in the city centre and the RG uni has already bought up some of them to use as additional teaching space. I’m sure it would happily buy more to accommodate its planned expansion.

It is possible the big one could take over the smaller one and merge them, or it could ‘own’ the other uni and run the courses out before rebranding, or it could just stop the courses and force students to find alternative provision (I’m not sure they would be allowed to do that).

The campus of my university was closed down by the main campus in 2016 which is similar, although not the same. They stopped recruiting and so the students who were first years when they decided to close were the only year group left by the end. I worked there and was also a student. It was awful. Like a ghost town. Our campus usually had 2000 students. By the end it didn't even have 200. Students were sometimes bussed across to the main campus (40 miles away over the Wolds) adding to their 'contact time'. Skeleton staff were kept on but it was a poor show for the students left and the uni tried to appease them with things like free graduation robes. But it was crap for the students and staff and there was a lot of bad feeling. They refused to waive any aspect of the fees generally but I do know some students settled with the uni and got some refunds but that wasn't generally the case at all.

If larger unis do go bust I dread to think how that will be for students. Decent lecturers will leave or be poached ASAP and students will be left with the rough end of the stick again. Uni's should be forced to be transparent as if they're on their last legs anyway what difference will it make? Students shouldn't be kept in the dark and sold a pup.

The OfS (regulator) requires all universities to have a student protection plan, which sets out how the closure of a course, campus or whole university would be handled. https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/for-providers/student-protection-and-support/student-protection/student-protection-plans/
Unis are required to work with the OfS if closure is likely.

Unis closing could also decimate the local economy built up around them. It could really hollow out some towns.

Student "experience" has changed so much since Covid. Mainly the students themselves there is far less of the traditional live in halls, make new friends, lots of partying and socialising etc.

Less drinking, more coffee, more connecting with "home" via social media etc.

The government needs to take responsibility and start proactively dealing with the shitshow they've created with funding.

My fear is that current students will end up with substandard teaching & supervision as you describe. Staff redundancy plus if there is no longterm role for them they will have to move on to another job ASAP. I've been a student on a course that was being updated and they really neglected the 'old course' students on favour of the newer years, then were under prepared and generally crap with organisation of the 'new' version as well!

I would imagine the first thing that would happen is anyone at the uni working on zero hours contracts immediately stops working and the associated services are impacted. Where I work that would be the gym, all the on campus retail, bars at the SU, some careers support… Plus any teaching done by zero hours would immediately cease, so seminars impacted. I’d imagine anything collaborative (like an engineering lab done with BAE or something) would stop being accessible to students while the partner explores what the closure would mean for them.

In reality, I don’t think anyone would go bust overnight or within a couple of weeks. You’d have a good amount of warning (even though it wouldn’t help someone in first or second year for example)

hit send too soon!

I think there would be a big push for other local providers to take students - they’d be able to sort the accredited courses first (healthcare, psychology) because there should be some standardisation, but others would take longer. I’d imagine your academic experience of a closure would be very different across different subject - Maths are going to have an easier time than a niche arts subject for example.

This. OfS would help manage the closure and finding of alternative places for the students. They've not to my knowledge done this at scale (my institution was involved when another smaller one closed some years ago) but there is enough demand for students in the sector for other unis to be falling over themselves to take them.

Also to add, when CCCU (based in Kent) nursing degrees were pulled (for different reasons), Surrey took the existing students, setting up a base in Kent, so the pool of alternative unis isn't just local ones.

Staff will leave voluntarily if the merge risks research quality. Your top researchers are not going to hang around to be handed a ton of modules to teach. If there are longer commutes for lecturers they may also take redundancy because they have school runs and childcare considerations too. This means lots of temp staff and early career/inexperienced staff brought in to plug the gaps.