Workers at the former Augusta State University in Georgia are spending the summer putting up new signs, redesigning the school’s website and carting furniture and files among offices.
There are new T-shirts in the bookstore, new logos on the business cards, a new fight song and alma mater — even a new name, for the first time, on the degrees of students who graduated in May.
What was known as Augusta State University when those students arrived as freshmen has been combined with the neighboring Georgia Health Sciences University to form Georgia Regents University. It’s a kind of private sector-style consolidation that is becoming increasingly common, not only for public institutions, but also for nonprofit, independent ones that can pool their resources and cut their costs in a time of falling budgets and demands for more efficiency in higher education.
“Size matters, even in academia,” said Ricardo Azziz, president of the new, 10,000-student unified school, which he said cut administrative costs by 3 percent in just its first few weeks. “A lot of times, we talk about students preferring small colleges, and that may be true, but it is much more costly to maintain all of the moving parts at a small college than at a larger university.”
There have been a few mergers of colleges and universities in the past; the University of Colorado at Denver combined with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 2004, for example, and the Medical University of Ohio merged with the University of Toledo in 2006.
But the pace of such consolidations is picking up. In addition to Augusta State and Georgia Health Sciences University, Georgia has fused six other institutions into three, reducing the total number in its public system to 31. An earlier reorganization of 15 of the state’s technical-college campuses is already saving an estimated $6.7 million a year on overhead, having done away with highly paid presidents and administrators at campuses with as few as 500 students, and instead consolidated them.
