A Messy Merger’s Unlikely Comeback

Vermont State University, the product of a 2022 merger of three struggling regional colleges, was created to save the state’s flailing higher education system. If it didn’t succeed, officials implied, budget cuts and campus closures could follow.

Its inaugural year was marked by controversy and leadership turnover. Overall enrollment declined by 6 percent, and first-year enrollment fell by 15 percent. It looked like maybe the experiment wasn’t enough to combat the state’s dire demographic challenges—or that mismanagement had sullied its promise.

But VTSU’s fortunes have reversed this fall. First-year enrollment surged by 14 percent, more than even its bullish new leadership anticipated, and overall enrollment is up by about 3 percent.

“While we were expecting some recovery, we were really pleased to see growth at this level,” VTSU president David Bergh told Inside Higher Ed. “I think it’s fair to say that 14 percent is good by any measure.”

Ricardo Azziz, director of the Center for Higher Education Mergers and Acquisitions, has been tracking the effects of public university consolidations for more than a decade. He said that VTSU’s enrollment trajectory is largely in line with others’, but that the extent of its pendulum swing—from a double-digit decline to a nearly equal recovery—is remarkable, especially for an institution operating in rural areas with declining populations.

“A dip in the first year or two after a merger is actually the most common enrollment trend we see,” he said. “Often there’s recovery after that, but to be honest, [VTSU’s] did surprise me … that’s a pretty amazing bump.”

Courtesy of Vermont State University

The Calm After the Storm

The merger that would become VTSU was marred by controversy from the start. Its first president, Parwinder Grewal, oversaw the university’s consolidation but resigned abruptly before the end of its first year after two of his proposals—turning the campuses’ libraries into digital-only collections and axing all sports teams—were met with fierce public backlash.

Bergh took over the presidency last November, inheriting a mess of bad press and jumbled administrative restructuring. He ascribes the university’s first-year enrollment troubles largely to this barrage of negative public attention. When students were applying in fall 2022, it wasn’t clear that VTSU would exist in the same form by the time they matriculated—if it existed at all.

“People were wondering, ‘When will the next shoe drop?’” Bergh said.

Reporting a 15 percent first-year enrollment decline in fall 2023 capped off a disastrous debut for VTSU. But when Inside Higher Ed spoke with Bergh’s predecessor, interim president Mike Smith, last fall, he was insistently optimistic.

“This is a transition year,” he said. “I expect us to start climbing out of this hole next year.”

It turns out Smith was right. He stewarded the institution through two academic years without any major controversies, and now students and families seem to have put aside their reservations.

“We had to work to restore trust,” Bergh said. “The relative stability of the past year, particularly after an extended period of turbulence, I think that alone has made a difference.”

Beyond the damaging impact of public scrutiny, the university’s first year was marked by administrative trial and error.

VTSU consists of four campuses, strewn across a 100-mile stretch of the state: Castleton University, Vermont Technical College and Northern Vermont University—the latter of which was itself a 2018 merger of Johnson and Lyndon State Colleges. Maurice Ouimet, VTSU’s vice president for admissions and enrollment services, led admissions at Castleton before the merger and saw the messy consolidation process firsthand. He said combining their enrollment operations under one proverbial roof was an enormously complex challenge that’s only just now paying off.

“Bringing together four admissions and financial aid offices, all with their own historic brand identities and strategies, was hard,” he said. “We had to shift from being competitors, sometimes fierce ones, to collaborators.”

Does Consolidation Equal Causation?

Azziz—who led the 2012 merger that created Augusta University, formerly known as Georgia Regents University, and became its founding president—is a big believer in the promise of consolidation, particularly for public university systems struggling with enrollment declines, administrative inefficiencies and overbuilt campuses. But he acknowledged that the challenging transition process can make or break a venture’s success.

“Leaders who have to manage that transition are generally change agents, and unfortunately they shouldn’t expect to have long tenures,” he said. “But [VTSU] just goes to show that if you’re prepared for an initial dip, a well-executed merger can really pay off … sometimes you just have to weather the storm.”

Courtesy of Vermont State University

Ouimet attributed much of VTSU’s enrollment boost to a strengthened partnership with Vermont’s community college system: Transfers were up by 33 percent this fall and accounted for 2 percent of the first-year enrollment growth.

But one undersung benefit of the consolidation came in the new name itself. Marketing and recruitment benefited simply by being under the banner of a Vermont State University, Ouimet said, instead of a Castleton or Lyndon State.

“Convincing students to attend is much easier, and the numbers prove that,” he said. In 2022 Castleton’s yield rate—the number of students who were admitted that ultimately enrolled—was 16 percent; this fall, VTSU’s yield rate was 37 percent, according to data provided by Ouimet.

The new branding has particularly helped boost applications from out of state, where VTSU has redoubled its recruitment efforts: 30 percent of the incoming class are nonresidents, and the yield rate for out-of-state applicants this fall was 20 percent.

“People know Vermont. The state has a real appeal to certain kinds of applicants—its natural beauty, its liberal politics, and that cachet is a lot more powerful when it’s in the name,” Ouimet said.

VTSU still serves more Vermonters proportionally than the flagship University of Vermont, where in 2022 fewer than a quarter of undergraduates were state residents. But given Vermont’s steadily declining high school population, Ouimet understands the importance of investing outside the state’s borders.

“We want to continue to be true to our mission as a public university, to serve the students of Vermont,” he said. “At the same time, there just aren’t enough students here … [so] our focus right now is on that out-of-state student and hopefully keeping them here after they graduate.”

Azziz agrees that while this fall’s boost is impressive—and improving in-state transfer pipelines is key to most system consolidations’ success—securing an out-of-state applicant pool is likely essential to VTSU’s future.

“Mergers don’t fix enrollment problems tied to demographics,” he said. “What they can do is give [colleges] a better understanding of what their target market should actually be.”