King’s College and Cranfield hope to be stronger together in surprise merger

The announcement that King’s College London is to absorb Cranfield University came as a surprise but not a shock to England’s higher education leaders, who have been braced for sudden announcements about job cuts and course closures.

But for staff and students at both institutions the news will have come as a shock, particularly at Cranfield, the smaller, highly focused postgraduate technology and management college that has its own airport.

Like many other UK universities in recent years, Cranfield has suffered financially, buffeted by changes in funding, taxation and immigration. In 2024-25 it reported a deficit of £8m before tax, compared with a £29m surplus the year before, which it blamed on a significant decline in international student recruitment.

Prof Dame Karen Holford, Cranfield’s vice-chancellor, said she expected the combined university to grow as a result of the merger, helped by a boost in international league tables from totalling up KCL and Cranfield’s research output.

“There’s no doubt the higher education sector is facing enormous challenges, that’s for sure … it’s just been wave after wave of financial hits due to government policy,” Holford said, noting changes to the international student visa rules and higher national insurance staff costs.

“At Cranfield we’re a postgraduate specialist institution, so we were hit very hard early on by the removal of [international students’] dependants visas, but we took action straight away. When you are a postgraduate institution, you have to recruit every year, there’s not that three-year cycle or cushion as with undergraduate courses, so we had to act quickly, we reshaped, we cut courses. So this merger is not predicated on further financial restructuring or job losses or anything like that. It’s actually a merger for growth.”

Holford said she understood why – in a financial climate where Russell Group universities such as Edinburgh and Nottingham are making big cuts in jobs and courses – staff may be nervous. But she argued that King’s and Cranfield had complementary strengths.

“Everywhere you look across the two institutions, we do things that they don’t, and they do things that we don’t. They are very policy focused, whereas we’re focused on industry. We’ve got world-renowned expertise in technology, in engineering and management, and longstanding partnerships with industry. They’ve got the interdisciplinary breadth and depth, and the global reach, and so we realised that together we could be more than the sum of our parts,” Holford said.

Because of its size and lack of undergraduates, Cranfield does not appear in most international league tables, while King’s ranks 31st in the influential . A provisional ranking for a combined KCL-Cranfield projects it to be 21st, close to Yale University.