Globalisation, mergers and
‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’:
re
flections from Wales
Nadine Zeeman*and Paul Benneworth
Center for Higher Education Policy Studies, University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands (Received 23 September 2016; accepted 24 September 2016)
Multi-site universities face the challenge of integrating campuses that may have dif-ferent profiles and orientations arising from place-specific attachments. Multi-campus universities created via mergers seeking to ensure long-term financial sustainability, and increasing their attractiveness to students, create a tension in campuses’ pur-poses. We explore how mergers in Wales created‘inadvertent’ multi-campus univer-sities whilst attempting to increase their overall competitiveness. We highlight three tensions that mergers created for contributing to local places, firstly a tendency for internal concentration, investing for growth in metropolitan not peripheral campuses; secondly, to looking beyond traditional local campuses and creating external cam-puses (in this case in London); and thirdly, to specialise camcam-puses on the basis of attracting external students not local needs. This creates a substantial challenge for managing multi-campus universities if they are to continue to be able to support the prosperity of more remote regions in an increasingly knowledge-based economy. Keywords: efficiency vs equity debate; multi-campus universities; university mergers; university third mission; widening participation
Introduction
Higher education institutions are facing enormous challenges shaped by the forces of globalisation, that see universities compete to attract students not just within national higher education systems but increasingly internationally. Allied with a steadily declin-ing source of public funddeclin-ing, universities are seekdeclin-ing new strategies for attractdeclin-ing highly talented students, driving them increasingly into competition to attract sufficient students to survive (Barber, Donnelly, & Rizvi,2013, p. 10). This pressure places tensions upon universities’ wider societal duties: the ends of surviving the competitive pressures justify the means of these competitive strategies. This may drive a public value failure, where competing universities do not provide optimal systems outcomes, by for example neglecting particular student segments (such as hard-to-reach local students) in favour of more lucrative pools of internationally, globally footloose students (Salmi,2009, pp. 13, 39, 43; Stromquist,2007, p. 83).
One strategy to compete and be more world-class is merging universities (Pinheiro, Geschwind, & Aarrevaara, 2015). Mergers have partly been driven by critical mass in research-intensive global universities (such as Aalto, Linnaeus, Manchester, Karlsruhe and Bordeaux). But mergers have also been seen in teaching-intensive universities with strong local missions delivered through local campuses (Charles, 2016). In these cases,
*Corresponding author. Email:n.zeeman@utwente.nl
© 2016 European Higher Education Society
merger processes can lead to the creation of inadvertent multi campus universities. In contrast to other cases in this special issue, these multi-campus universities were not deliberately created this way but have arisen to help several (often) weaker (‘less world class’) institutions compete for students. Our contribution to this special issue is in exploring how these ‘inadvertent’ multi-campus universities function under competitive pressure. We ask whether local campuses created to serve particular communities can continue to serve those communities post-merger (Bennetot Pruvot, Claeys-Kulik, & Estermann, 2015, p. 64). This is, of course, a modern manifestation of the more, long-standing set of tensions in higher education between equity and efficiency (Clark, 1983). Our specific research question is ‘can mergers driven by competitive pressures sustainably ensure continued local contributions?’
We take the case of Wales, where policy-makers sought to reduce university num-bers to improve their teaching, research and management quality (Benneworth & De Boer, 2015, p. 3), resulting in a number of ‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’. These institutions had dual missions to compete globally, whilst sustaining provision of access to higher education in some of the United Kingdom’s most disadvantaged and socially excluded communities (Kelsey, 2015), exacerbating these tensions between equity and efficiency. By exploring these mergers’ evolution, we can reflect on the wider issue of the resolution and accommodation of conflicting institutional logics within these inadvertent multi-campus universities.
Globalisation as a threat to widening access to higher education
In several European countries, structural reforms have been or are taking place to change national higher education systems, often understood as being a response to the umbrella challenge of‘globalisation’. We situate our perspective here as following what Marginson and Rhoades (2002) call inelegantly the glonacal agency. This approach sees globalisation as being a phenomenon shaped within national contexts and implemented by local agency, giving strong local variations and differences within an overall common trend. Globalisa-tion has been important for higher educaGlobalisa-tion because it has opened up naGlobalisa-tional boundaries. Previously it has been assumed that higher education was primarily a national activity within systems with relatively little leakage or cross fertilisation (De Boer & File,2009, p. 11). Globalisation has driven changes at a range of levels within higher education, from high level structural reforms made by governments and national funding agencies within national systems, to governance arrangements between funders and universities, down to the organisation and structure of universities. That the responses have taken place at a range of different structural levels, involving different kinds of actors with considerable autonomy, has meant that the aggregate effect of the responses has been unpredictable (see Pinheiro, Wengenge-Ouma, Balbachevsky, & Cai,2015).
Building on Barber et al. (2013), we identify three main challenges that globalisation brings higher education. First is the general situation of reduced public funding for stu-dents, often with increasing conditionality, to be ‘won’ by higher education institutions by competing for previously automatically allocated resources. Secondly, institutions must attract the right talent, and need strong research profiles in order to attract the best staff, as well as students who choose universities often on the basis of international rather than national comparisons (Barber et al., 2013, p. 10). The final challenge we identify is an increased attention to international rankings, often articulated around a particular kind of stylised ‘world class’ university. Even though there is a widespread recognition of the shortcomings of these ranking systems, they are taken particularly
seriously by higher education policy-makers, which ensures that the scores that they report are taken seriously (Hazelkorn, 2015; Van Vught & Ziegele, 2012). International rankings provide visibility for institutions in attracting their talent and securing funding, becoming an inescapable fact of contemporary university policy discourses (Delgado-Márquez, Hurtado-Torres, & Bondar,2011, p. 271).
Pressures of globalisation have contributed to strategic overload for universities (De Boer, Enders, & Leisyte,2007). The contemporary university enjoys considerable auton-omy to pursue its interests, and the societal interest is ensured through a process of tar-get setting and competition in markets (Kickert, 1995). Universities develop strategies to best deliver these goals and secure their wider survival, thereby ensuring efficiency of public expenditure. But with universities facing so many demands from so many quarters, they are forced to prioritise only the most urgent missions, thereby neglecting less urgent missions. At its most benign, this could lead to a vertical segmentation of universities, with different universities specialising in different missions, prioritising either research or teaching, and developing distinct research profiles. But this also risks having ‘orphan’ missions within a higher education system, where no higher education institution pursues those missions despite their general public utility.
Pressures of globalisation create a specific risk that more locally focused missions are overlooked as universities rush to develop their global profiles. Rural campuses have two kinds of locally facing missions which push them to both meet local students’ educational needs and focus teaching/ research on the regional economy’s needs (Charles, 2016, p. 7). But both of these strategies are under pressure from attempts to be world class, where locally relevant research is seen as not being rigorous, and local teaching is unattractive within global higher education markets. Universities may recruit students globally rather than pursing more reluctant local students. Students of lower socio-economic status are often far more resistant to entering higher education, with universities investing considerable resources to addressing particular barriers; these students often are more expensive to educate than other kinds of students because of their higher drop-out rates and need for additional tutoring, counselling and other kinds of student support (Powdthavee & Vignoles,2009). Global pressures may risk universities losing interest in attracting these non-traditional students in favour of competing for students globally.
Indeed, the role of local service provision for excluded communities is rarely specifi-cally addressed in debates around globalisation and the world class university. Although the world-class university concept is an emergent observation of a particular class of university performing well in league tables, ‘world class universities’ have a strong research profile, attract the best talent and offer the best facilities. Many countries have invested heavily in structural higher education reforms to try and create world class uni-versities (Cremonini, Westerheijden, Benneworth, & Dauncey, 2013). One of the com-monly occurring instruments to achieve this has been through institutional mergers to create new high-scoring, well-ranked institutions (Salmi, 2009, pp. 43, 48). Several European countries have opted for mergers, such as Denmark, Germany, Sweden and France, to consolidate their systems and strengthen their position in increasingly com-petitive and globalising higher education markets (Bennetot Pruvot et al.,2015, p. 19).
These mergers have not been restricted to research-intensive, global institutions, but have also been applied to raise the efficiency of formerly autonomous small colleges with place-specific mandates, integrating them into much larger, more globally or internationally oriented institutions. Not all these small institutions are necessarily local colleges with specific mandates to contribute to widening participation in higher educa-tion amongst tradieduca-tionally excluded groups, but in this paper we are concentrating our
concern exclusively upon that group. Merging locally facing small institutions into large competitive institutions raises the question of whether these local missions can survive in the newly merged institutions. Is it possible under these conditions of increasing pres-sures for globalisation to maintain these two distinct missions within a single, newly merged institution? Can merged higher education institutions sustain the local mission, spirit, ethos and societal contribution of the small campus?
Structural reforms Wales: collaborations and mergers
The case study reported here was undertaken as part of the Structural Reform in Higher Education project funded by the European Commission, in which the Welsh higher educa-tion mergers were examined as a case study of wider structural reform (more detail on this is provided in Zeeman & Benneworth,in press). The case study involved a widespread review of policy documents and published literature related to the merger process from the main principals, including the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales (HEFCW), the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG), the National Assembly for Wales (including their standing committees responsible for education affairs) and Universities Wales (UW). This was complemented with 11 interviews with individuals in Wales involved in the vari-ous merger processes, including people working for WAG, UW and HEFCE and higher education institutions involved in different ways in driving through the mergers. On the basis of the policy document review and the interviews, an overview of the merger pro-cesses was provided, with specific emphasis being placed on the creation of what we call ‘inadvertent multi-campus institutions’, where campuses with specific widening participa-tion remits were merged in attempts to create instituparticipa-tions with a world class profile.
In Wales there has been a strong emphasis on widening participation in higher educa-tion from non-tradieduca-tional groups in the context of a lengthy post-2000 merger process. Until 1994, Welsh higher education was part of the United Kingdom’s dual system, with separate funding for universities and polytechnics. From 1994, Wales was created as a dis-tinctive higher education system which inherited a large number of relatively small institu-tions, often in rural locations. When the directly elected Welsh Assembly was created in 1999, powers over higher education were passed to the Assembly, providing an impetus to streamline the system and reduce the overall number of higher educations. At the same time, Wales remains the UK’s second poorest region (after Northern Ireland), with the lowest participation rate in the UK, and a clear need to address the issue of widening access to students from socially excluded backgrounds. In the period from 2000 to 2015, the total number of higher education institutions in Wales decreased in number from 13 to 8, with a significant increase in the numbers of students per institution.
This provides a basis to reflect on the tensions that globalisation brings for multi-campus universities with distinct place-based and locality-specific missions. In this paper, we are specifically concerned with identifying the tensions that have arisen in the missions in creating ‘inadvertently multi-campus universities’. We identified two Welsh merger processes where substantive tensions were evident between the merged institu-tions’ missions relating to widening participation and globalisation (a specific manifesta-tion of Clark’s equity/efficiency tension). We provide an overview of how these tensions influenced the mergers and the emergent local missions and contributions post-merger. This forms the basis for our discussion of the challenges of sustainably manag-ing multi-campus universities embodymanag-ing distinct orientations towards society.
We do not wish in identifying tensions to challenge the consensus that the merger process in Wales has been a success, nor to criticise the parties involved in merger.
Rather we seek to use a stylised reading of this case study to address a wider (and in our view under-researched) question: what happens to place-specific missions of local campuses brought under multi-campus systems pursuing efficiency above equity?
Overview of the merger process in Wales
Following the referendum decision in Wales in 1998 to create a new devolved Assem-bly, HEFCW and the Welsh Office produced an analysis of the Welsh higher education landscape to inform the incoming Welsh government of their potential policy choices. This 1999 analysis reflected experiences following the separation of the Welsh system from the wider UK system in 1994, imprinted with longer-standing traumatic memories of mergers being used to rescue failing institutions from bankruptcy. Welsh universities were small and had low research income (Audit Committee, 2009, p. 2; Colman,2009, p. 6; Parken, 2011, p. 6; Welsh Assembly Government, 2002, pp. 3, 6). This was reflected in a poor performance of Welsh universities when benchmarked against UK universities and their invisibility in national (and later global) rankings (HEFCW,1999). The briefing note recommended a new Welsh Assembly Government to address three medium-term challenges facing Welsh higher education. Firstly, the higher educa-tion institueduca-tions faced increased competieduca-tion for students within the United Kingdom (UK) and also from overseas institutions (Audit Committee, 2009, p. 2). Secondly, Welsh institutions faced greater competition for research funding, especially from the Research Councils which funded major research projects (Welsh Assembly Government, 2002, p. 3). Finally, there was a lack of financial management competency in some smaller institutions, in terms of handling larger corporate sponsorships, research con-tracts and estate development projects. Table 1 gives an overview of the situation in Wales at the start of the merger process.
By 2002, the WAG had decided to remake the Welsh higher education system, launching the Reconfiguration and Collaboration Fund (RCF). The RCF became the principal tool for stimulating mergers of smaller institutions in Wales. We are in this paper only concerned with the reconfigurations, where universities could come together and apply for funding to merge with other Welsh universities. Funding (typically of the Table 1. Higher education institutions Wales in 2003.
HEI
Total enrolment
(all levels, part time and full time)
University of Wales, Newport 8,700
North East Wales Institute of Higher Education 6,397 University of Wales Institute, Cardiff 8,594 Swansea Institute of Higher Education 4,974
Trinity College, Carmathen 1,803
University of Wales, Lampeter 3,493
University of Wales, Aberystwyth 9,835
University of Wales, Bangor 9,599
Cardiff University 19,929
University of Wales, Swansea 11,727
University of Wales, College of Medicine 4,144 Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama 583
University of Glamorgan 19,350
order of £15 m per merger) was provided in return for the delivery of a full structural merger. HEFCW developed a standard manual for mergers involving governing bodies and university leaders making immediate agreements, developing detailed implementa-tion plans, then unifying activities into single instituimplementa-tions. This merger policy lasted from 2003 to 2012 (Gummett,2015, p. 98); although the process was not seen as fully completed, merger was suspended in 2012 as a policy priority. In this period the number of institutions decreased from 13 to 8 (see Table2).
Tensions between world class universities and local communities
We are here concerned with the mergers that led to the creation of what we stylised as ‘inadvertent multi campus universities’, embodying a tension between achieving global competitiveness and local education access. We here restrict ourselves to the discussions of two mergers where these tensions came to the fore, the University of South Wales (USW), and the University of Trinity St David: in two other mergers, these tensions prevented the completion of merger:
• A potential merger between Cardiff University and the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama (RWCMD) was called off because of a mismatch in institutional cultures, although RWCMD was later successfully taken over by Glamorgan University.
• Several proposals concerning what is now Glyndŵr University (with Aberystwyth and Bangor), the other two‘northern’ Wales universities, were abandoned because of the mismatch between the more vocational Glyndŵr and the more research-oriented Aberystwyth and Bangor.
Table 2. Student enrolments by higher education provided (2014/2015).
HEI Notes
Total enrolment (all levels, part time and full time) Glyndŵr University Formerly known as North East Wales Institute of
Higher Education. Glyndŵr received university status in 2008
6,765
Cardiff Metropolitan University
Formerly known as University of Wales Institute, Cardiff
13,670 University of South
Wales
Merger of University of Glamorgan and University of Wales, Newport. Incorporates Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama
27,710
University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
Merger of University of Wales, Lampeter, Trinity University College Carmarthen and Swansea Metropolitan University
10,425
Aberystwyth University
University of Wales, Aberystwyth 9,835 Bangor University Formerly known as University of Wales, Bangor 10,765 Cardiff University Merger of Cardiff University and University of
Wales, College of Medicine
30,480 Swansea University Formerly known as University of Wales, Swansea 16,020
University of South Wales
The USW is a new higher education institution formed in 2013 as a merger of Univer-sity of Glamorgan (UoG) and UniverUniver-sity of Wales, Newport (UWN). In 2011, HEFCW wanted the UWN, UoG and Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU) to merge to create a metropolitan university in South-East Wales, able to contribute to the region’s eco-nomic development and help create an increasingly skilled workforce. The new univer-sity would achieve critical mass and better compete for research funding (HEFCW, 2011, p. 3; Welsh Government, 2012). However, CMU refused to engage in the merger talks, and in November 2012, after it became clear that a forced merger would create considerable legal uncertainty, the minister announced that the merger would only involve UoG and UWN.
The University currently has four campuses spread around South Wales: Pontypridd, Cardiff, Caerleon and Newport (Gummett, 2015, p. 98; Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education [QAA],2015a, p. 4). The realignment and redevelopment activities of USW have been a challenging process, with the campus realignment programme still ongoing at the time of writing. In 2014, the university decided to reduce to three cam-puses (Pontypridd, Cardiff and Newport) each with a distinctive profile (whilst planning an ultimately ill-fated new Docklands campus in London that closed without having recruited students) (Information Commissioner’s Office [ICO], 2015, pp. 5, 6, 12; University of South Wales,2015, p. 4).
In 2014, USW’s Board of Governors decided to close the Caerleon campus, transfer-ring its courses to other campuses. There were at the time of writing plans to expand the existing campuses, particularly in Cardiff, associated with the creative sector, and in Newport. In Cardiff, the ATRiuM building expanded to meet the needs of the business community for graduates in the creative industry (‘A space to create’, n.d.; HEFCW, 2016, p. 16). In Newport efforts were made to partner with a local further education col-lege to create a knowledge quarter within wider efforts to improve student progression into higher education.
We see here a clear illustration of the issue with which were are concerned, the effect on more peripheral campuses in ‘inadvertent multi-campus universities’. Given the closeness of Carleon to Newport, the issue here was not immediately the withdrawal of provision, but rather that an emergent tendency to concentrate facilities in fewer cam-puses more oriented towards generic provision. University management justified closing Carleon campus in terms of offering a better student experience, by offering distinctive campuses offering similar disciplines and campuses that are closer to employers (‘Cam-pus Changes’,n.d.). At the same time, they invested in a campus in a capital city that has a profile related to new metropolitan-concentrated industries (creative industries). This suggests a potential tendency for university leadership, in case of UWS the board of governors, to choose in favour of the international and metropolitan over the local and parochial, with the potential problems that this might bring for promoting widening participation.
University of Wales, Trinity Saint David
The establishment of the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David (UWTSD) in 2012 was the result of the merger of four higher education institutions. Firstly, the University of Wales, Lampeter merged with Trinity University College Carmarthen in 2010, later being joined in 2013 by Swansea Metropolitan University. The fourth institution was the University of Wales, an organisation primarily responsible for accrediting third-party
higher education courses, joining the merger in 2011, following a governance crisis involving overseas affiliates and student study visas. The founding universities were two of Wales’ oldest, founded in 1822 and 1848 respectively as theological and teacher training colleges. The university today has campuses in Carmarthen, Cardiff, Lampeter, London andfive campuses in Swansea as part of a long-standing collaboration with fur-ther education colleges fur-there (Gummett, 2015, p. 89; QAA, 2015b, p. 3). The Cardiff campus hosts the Wales International Academy of Voice, a relatively new institution founded initially with support from Cardiff University and later adopted by UWTSD; this very small, specialised organisation offers only two post-graduate level courses, and is a‘campus’ comparable with UWTSD’s other locations.
Following this merger process, internal research revealed a high level of student dis-satisfaction with the availability of resources in Swansea, traceable to long-term underin-vestment in real estate at Swansea Metropolitan University. The university therefore decided to create a new Swansea campus to provide students with modern education and research facilities. The initial campus mandate was to improve access to higher edu-cation in and around Swansea, and develop the skills required by local employees and communities. The university also aimed to use the new campus development to improve local community engagement, and in 2015 organised a public consultation on the new campus plans (Stephens,2015). The result of this was a master plan and a new campus proposal for the Waterfront Innovation Quarter in Swansea, with its stated aim to revi-talise and reconnect the waterfront to the city. That project had at the time of writing received planning permission, and is currently in development with the aim of comple-tion in 2018.
Similar to USW, UWTSD opened a campus in south London in order to improve its overall metropolitan presence, and to attract students who would never consider study-ing in south Wales. The London campus offered bachelor, master and MBA courses from the Business School targeted at a lucrative international market. The Carmarthen and Lampeter campuses hosted for historical reasons the arts and social studies, educa-tion and training (Carmarthen) and humanities (Lampeter) faculties respectively, whilst other courses were provided in Swansea, including the popular courses in business and engineering. In contrast to USW, the UWTSD’s three campuses are spread across three relatively distant regions (by travel time if not by location), and each retained a relatively specialised profile related to their historical backgrounds.
Community engagement: re-emergence of multi-sided campuses
In this paper we have posed the question of whether campuses created to serve particu-lar local communities can continue to serve those communities when those campuses are merged into larger institutions. The Wales case provides an interesting first insight into the way that these tensions may play out. It provides an extreme example of cam-pus-based mission tensions, which may be less visibly present in other multi-campus systems mixing distinctly profiled campuses with different sensitivities. This paper is not an evaluation of the success or otherwise of mergers in Wales, but rather an attempt to observe these pressures involving universities with quite different missions emerging in multi-campus arrangements. The cases suggest that there are three tendencies that may harm the long-term sustainability of multi-campus systems, and which require fur-ther consideration.
Thefirst of these is the perhaps unsurprising internal concentration process, whereby resources become concentrated into the core campus at the expense of the periphery.
In both mergers, we see examples where the universities chose to developflagship cam-puses within real estate development programmes, allowing themselves to brand and profile their activities as relating to the ‘new economy’. In both Cardiff and Swansea plans were made to promote the creative and cultural sectors through the development of newflagship activities, USW’s ATRiuM building in Cardiff and UWTSD Waterfront Innovation Quarter in Swansea. Although USW’s additional investment in Newport appears counter to this tendency, it is in reality a shift away from a suburban campus in Caerleon towards a more urban waterfront location.
Both cases can be interpreted as a tendency for future investment in potential growth areas to be located where that growth is anticipated to happen rather than where that growth may benefit localities. By positioning themselves as being dependent upon these wider trends and choosing therefore for metropolitan rather than excluded locations, uni-versities could potentially be driving a wedge between outward-facing, growing metropolitan campus, and inward-facing, declining peripheral campuses. To avoid a parallel segmentation of the value of education between first-class ‘city’ students and second-class peripheral students, there is a need for a strong investment models to con-tinue to support investment over disinvestment from peripheral campuses (as is seen for example in Australia and Norway).
The second tendency is the attractiveness of deterritorialising strategies for universi-ties with ostensibly teaching-led research missions. We see that both merged institutions attempted to increase overall student numbers and fee income through delivering courses for highly mobile students (primarily business and economics) in London, a city that is extremely attractive for internationally mobile students. A further step to recruit more international students would be to establish overseas campuses, a market in to which a number of UK universities have entered enthusiastically. The university is an institution that has demonstrated the greatest place loyalty, with only very rarely univer-sities entirely relocating between cities (the University of Lincoln arguably being the UK’s most visible example). But further financial pressures could exacerbate this deter-ritorialisation of universities in pursuit of the ever-elusive financial sustainability, thereby undermining their locally place-specific contributions. To counteract this deterri-torialisation, universities could consider franchising these activities to third parties, seen in Ireland as opportunity for cost control to increase Irish universities’ financial health (Grant Thornton,2014).
The third tendency is that of specialisation of the campuses to create local critical mass that is self-sustaining without necessarily being related to the local community, running the risk of these engaged campuses becoming more isolated from their localities (cf. Charles,2016). Both Lampeter and Carmarthen have long-standing histories of rela-tive disciplinary specialisation related to their histories as theology and education train-ing colleges; their merger into UWTSD emphasised this by casttrain-ing them as faculties within a university. There is a similar specialisation in USW, with Newport being trans-formed from a more general university institute into a faculty specialised in youth work and teaching. This runs the risk of losing those activities that are of more value to the local community, which build linkages and help raise local participation and engage-ment with higher education. Clearly, strategic pathways need to be found for universities to reap benefits from their local engagement, not just purely financially, but in accessing other kinds of resources through which they can deliver their overall missions (Benneworth,2013).
The case of Wales makes clear the extent to which the challenge of globalisation represents a multidimensional threat to the longer term sustainability of multi-campus
universities that use their multiple locations as a means of fulfilling a wider societal mission in their service of a range of communities. In combination we see that these pressures combined depict an unwelcome future for those who see local branches of multi-campus universities as bedrocks supporting a range of local service provision (Charles,2016). There is a clear risk that these campuses become neatly packaged into coherent units offering education to international students, isolated from the local envi-ronment, ultimately to be franchised, offshored and distantiated from their local origins. This runs the risk of reducing management awareness of the local communities in which they are rooted, and making the rewards of internationally mobile students seem more achievable than those of local non-traditional students.
That in turn may lead to a gradual concentration of university activities in more core locations that those students perceive as attractive to the detriment of these satellite activities; we here point to the 2014 announcement by Hull University of the closure of its Scarborough satellite as an example of the risk of where this tendency may lead. But just as risky from a local development perspective is the increasing isolation of these campuses from their local environments, which may have few other access points into the knowledge economy, and which may have few options to retain students to study locally. If policy-makers are serious in using universities as a development tool to drive knowledge-capital based economic development in more peripheral locations, then this is a problem. Our paper shows how much more thought needs to be given to develop-ing models and philosophies of higher education capable of meetdevelop-ing local needs, whilst reflecting the necessary high administrative, professional and physical standards of con-temporary universities.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the guest editor of the special issue for his encouragement and insightful remarks throughout the process. The authors would also like to thank Lynne Humphrey for her initial preparatory work in the case studies, as well as to the eleven interviewees for their time and frankness. Any omissions or errors remain the responsibility of the authors.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding
This paper was based on research undertaken within the framework of the‘Structural Reform of Higher Education project’, funded by the DG Education and Culture of the European Commission.
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