Article 4: Changing Names, Merging Colleges: Investigating the History of Higher Education Adaptation

Recently, two phenomena have been discussed in higher education-specific media: (1) the prevalence of institutional mergers to promote longevity and (2) institutional rebranding to improve public perceptions and increase enrollment through enhanced and/or clarified missions (Wexler 2015). Although such has been reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education and U.S. News and World Report as recent developments, neither can be considered “new.” Throughout the history of American higher education, mergers and renamings have been relatively common, especially given economic crises (Burke 1982; Martin, Samels, and Associates 2009). Although U.S. higher education has existed since the seventeenth-century, statistical analysis of historical data indicates that national/international financial difficulties throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty- first centuries have forced college administrators to consider mergers and institutional rebranding to improve organizational subsistence.