Announcements that a college or university is closing usually include a reference to an unsuccessful attempt to find a partner who would have allowed the school to continue operating.
While many of these schools have simply waited too long to go looking for a partner, there’s also another factor here. When they finally went looking, their search was in the wrong places.
There is almost never a good case to be made for a stronger institution to partner with a struggling one in the same geographic area unless there’s a particular program, location, or something that’s of interest to the stronger school. That path leads to acquisition and the disappearance of one school.
And geographic proximity even works against partnerships between or among schools of relatively comparable strength. Competition–real or imagined, actual or emotional–gets in the way.
In spite of the seemingly logical impulse to go in search of geographically proximate potential partners, we believe that value-proximity is more important. And better than value-proximity is value-alignment.
Value-alignment and geographic diversity are a potentially powerful combination.
And when they’re elements of a forward-looking collaborative solution that isn’t a merger or acquisition, they have even more promise. Join the conversation.