The Merger Conversations You Don’t Hear About Are Already Happening
Brian Weinblatt, Ph.D., CFRE
Founder and Principal, Higher Ed Consolidation Solutions
Earlier this year, at a higher education conference, I began hearing different versions of the same story. The pattern kept surfacing at other conferences and in conversations with institutional leaders over the months that followed.
Presidents, provosts, chiefs of staff, and other senior leaders told me their institutions had received unsolicited approaches from other colleges or universities over the past several years. In some cases, more than once. One newly minted chief financial officer told me that to his surprise, he learned that his institution had been approached five times in recent years.
Another institution had quietly knocked on their door, asking whether they would be receptive to a merger or acquisition.
When I asked how they had responded, the answers were remarkably consistent: They had considered the opportunity, concluded it was not a fit, and declined.
Those may have been exactly the right decisions. An institution should not pursue a merger simply because someone asks.
What surprised me was how frequently the experience came up. Public announcements tell us about combinations that move forward. They tell us little about the approaches that are considered and declined, or the possibilities that never advance beyond an initial conversation. These conversations offered a glimpse of that less visible activity.
They also prompted a follow-up question: Had these leaders developed a framework for evaluating the next approach?
An institution does not need to be actively seeking merger partners to need a framework for evaluating one.
Choosing not to pursue mergers proactively is entirely reasonable. Being unprepared to evaluate an unsolicited opportunity is a different matter.
What does “not a fit” mean?
Fit is a sensible basis for a decision, provided the institution has defined it.
Does the opportunity conflict with the institution’s mission? Would it introduce financial obligations that the institution cannot responsibly assume? Is the geography wrong? Are there incompatible expectations about governance, religious identity, or academic priorities?
Or does the potential partner simply look different from the institution as it exists today?
That distinction matters. Some differences are legitimate reasons to decline. Others may be the source of the opportunity.
A college with a different academic portfolio could bring capabilities that an institution has spent years discussing but has never been able to build. A different geographic footprint could provide access to students it does not currently reach. Conversely, a partner that looks familiar on paper could add little strategic value while creating substantial obligations.
An evaluation framework helps leaders distinguish between those possibilities. Fit should be assessed against the institution’s strategy, not simply its current profile.
How do you plan to reach your aspirational peers?
Consider a familiar institutional exercise: identifying peer institutions and aspirational peers. The first group helps an institution understand where it stands. The second describes where it would like to go. Closing that gap through incremental growth can take many years. Meanwhile, the institutions on the aspirational list are pursuing their own ambitions.
A well-chosen merger can change that trajectory. It can add established academic programs, faculty expertise, research infrastructure, or geographic reach in a single transaction, capabilities that could take decades to develop independently. The purpose is not to acquire a more impressive list of peers. It is to expand what the institution can accomplish for its students and the communities it serves.
A transaction can change an institution’s scale much faster than its operations and culture can be integrated. Realizing the benefits requires investment and sustained leadership. But the possibility belongs in the initial evaluation: Could this combination help us become the institution we have been planning to become? A readiness framework should identify opportunities to advance the strategy, not just reasons to decline.
Build the framework before the next approach
In the board and leadership workshops we conduct at HCS Strategy, we use breakout groups to examine the institution’s mission, core values, and strategic priorities. Participants discuss the attributes they most want in a partner, those they prefer to avoid, and the conditions that would end a conversation altogether.
Those discussions begin to establish a practical evaluation framework around four questions:
What must we preserve? Which aspects of the institution’s mission, values, identity, and commitments to students are non-negotiable?
What would advance our strategy? Which partner attributes would strengthen the institution or accelerate the achievement of its already established goals?
What are we prepared to assume? What financial obligations, operational complexity, and integration demands could the institution responsibly undertake?
What would cause us to decline? Which conditions are true showstoppers, and which are concerns that further information or negotiation might resolve?
The distinctions are important. A preference is not necessarily a requirement. An unfamiliar characteristic is not necessarily a liability. And a genuine showstopper should be identified before enthusiasm for a particular opportunity makes it inconvenient to acknowledge.
Trustees and administrators may agree to consider the “right” opportunity while holding very different ideas about what would make it right. Working through those differences gives them a shared basis for evaluating an approach.
An institution can begin this work in a focused board and leadership session, then assign responsibility for refining and documenting the criteria. It does not need to launch a partner search or wait for its next strategic planning cycle.
The framework should organize judgment, not replace it. Its purpose is to determine whether an opportunity warrants deeper investigation. An opportunity that passes the initial screen should move to structured discussions and due diligence to test the strategic case, financial assumptions, and integration demands, rather than directly to a decision to merge.
Readiness includes knowing how to say no
An institution also needs a process for using the framework.
Who receives an approach? Who conducts the initial assessment? What information is needed? When should board leadership become involved? Who is responsible for communicating a decision?
That preparation need not create an elaborate bureaucracy. It should prevent an unsolicited inquiry from becoming either an automatic rejection or an open-ended conversation with no clear ownership.
A prepared institution may still decline most opportunities. The benefit is a more deliberate decision, grounded in agreed priorities rather than criteria assembled around a particular proposal.
The response should also be timely, respectful, and confidential. Another institution’s willingness to explore a merger is not yours to disclose. Sharing that it approached and was rejected risks damaging its reputation and a relationship that may matter in the future. Confidentiality should not end when the answer is no.
The conversations I have had throughout the year suggest that leaders should not assume their last unsolicited approach will be their last. They do not need to launch a partner search in response. They should establish what would make the next approach worth considering.
You do not need to be actively looking for a merger partner. You do need to be ready when one comes looking for you.