ATLANTA — The University of Georgia will no longer be the biggest school in the state following a merger of two Atlanta colleges set in motion Tuesday.
The Board of Regents also voted unanimously to finalize a consolidation begun last year of two Cobb County schools, Kennesaw State University and Southern Polytechnic University.
The new development came with no discussion when the board accepted the staff recommendation to merge Georgia State University with Georgia Perimeter College to form a 54,000-student school that will be the largest in the University System of Georgia. It will eclipse UGA’s 35,000 enrollment.
Georgia State President Mark Decker said the combined school won’t automatically have a greater call on state resources because of its size under the state’s new, graduation-rate appropriations.
“The funding formula in the old days was based on how many students you enrolled, but it also meant you had to pay the bills for supporting all those additional students,” he said. “The funding formula going forward is going to be based on our recent graduates, so it’s incumbent upon us to take students, whether they start at a perimeter campus or downtown, is to get them through to completion.
The three-year-completion rate at the two-year Georgia Perimeter is just 6 percent. With Georgia State’s 54-percent graduation rate, system officials hope that Decker will be able to apply his magic to the junior college, too.
Houston Davis, the system’s chief academic officer, said the decision to merge a research university with a junior college doesn’t represent a policy change that would impact UGA, Georgia Regents University or Georgia Tech, the system’s other research institutions. Nor will it alter the political dynamics in favor of Atlanta compared to other cities with schools.
“Those students are already here in Atlanta’s metro area. It’s not like we’re moving those institutions into the Atlanta metro area,” he said. “These two institutions already have a significant amount of (students) transferring back and forth. From a functional standpoint, you could think about these two institutions as a network of campuses now.”
The five previous consolidations of schools — including Augusta State and Georgia Health Sciences into Georgia Regents — provided useful lessons on how to blend colleges. Davis would point to no negative examples, only saying those experiences reinforced the importance of strong leadership.
“Good, strong leadership really is the most important ingredient here,” he said.
GRU President Ricardo Azziz, who has received criticism for his role in the consolidation of the schools in Augusta, hasn’t spoken to Decker yet. When he does, he will stress the need to ensure that everyone involved shares the view of the final product.
“Having a clear vision of what the unified university will look like is important,” Azziz said. “We did that. We obviously had a vision of what it could look like.”
Consolidations fail when people fight to go into a different direction, he said.
“That’s important, to let everybody know why they should benefit from the consolidation,” he said, adding the need for transparency.
Decker is relying less on GRU’s lessons than he is on his own experience as provost at the University of South Carolina where he oversaw both the main campus in Columbia as well as affiliated junior colleges around the state.
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