State's unis must merge to survive

AT least two of SA's three universities must merge if they want to continue to compete, the University of South Australia's vice-chancellor says.

AT least two of SA's three universities must merge if they want to continue to compete, the University of South Australia's vice-chancellor says.

Peter Hoj said the budgets of the local universities were dwarfed by some of those in the eastern states and overseas and consolidation made sense.

"We have to lift our sights to competing nationally and internationally, rather than having three universities incessantly trying to slice up a fixed cake," Professor Hoj said.

"The catchline is `how do we transfer the mindset from being state-focused in competitiveness terms to being national and global?' "

"This has to be a live discussion in South Australia," Mr Hoj said.

Leaders from the University of Adelaide and UniSA had been in merger discussions over the past few months before the University of Adelaide abandoned the idea and elected to move ahead with appointing a new vice chancellor.

The catalyst for the discussions - between the universities' chancellors, Adelaide's Robert Hill and UniSA's Ian Gould - was the movement of the Royal Adelaide Hospital to the city's West End, where it will be adjacent to the South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute, along with the open VC position.

Professor Hoj said there were big cost savings to be made from merging universities, which could be put towards attracting and retaining the best staff.

These included removing the duplication of senior staff roles and not needing to duplicate infrastructure.

"When the universities make decisions about large investments, they should do them with a view to revisiting this issue," Professor Hoj said.

"What we want to do is to make sure that we always have a world-class state-based university system, because if we don't have that, there will be people who decide not to relocate to South Australia to work.

"It's a very important piece in the jigsaw puzzle of the state's attractiveness that we have a great school system and a great university system."

Mr Hoj said the University of Melbourne, Monash and Sydney universities, and the University of Queensland had annual budgets greater than $1.5 billion.

This compared to a budget at Adelaide of $762 million this year, about $550 million at UniSA, founded in 1991, and about $400 million at Flinders, founded in 1966.

Mr Hill said the State Government would have to legislate to consolidate the universities.

Mr Hill said some senior members of the University of Adelaide community supported the idea of merging, and others were not supportive, but it was eventually decided that there were benefits to the status quo.

"In any merger, there would be advantages and disadvantages, and from an Adelaide University perspective it was decided that it would be better to grow from within rather than from without," he said.

Mr Hill said while Adelaide was part of the "group of eight" major Australian universities, it had less than half the student numbers of six of those eight and had much less in the way of endowment money.

He said Adelaide was among the top 100 universities in the world, but it was important that that remain the case.

"And it doesn't remain the case by standing still.

"The sector is changing rapidly and there is an enormous amount of money being invested in higher education across the world, particularly in Asia at the moment," he said.

"The resource challenge ... from the point of view of the investments we'll have to make in terms of infrastructure and research, it's going to be very challenging."

A spokeswoman for Premier Jay Weatherill said he was not necessarily opposed to the idea, but a formal proposal had not been put to him.

"Any proposal to merge universities is a matter for the respective governing councils," he said in a statement.

"The government has not formed a view on the benefits or otherwise of the merger of any of the universities."

UniSA marketing student Lucy Green, 20, said a merger made sense in terms of the ability to share resources.

"An advantage would be the pooled resources. For example Barr Smith Library (at Adelaide) is a really good library," she said.