The welcome creation of a top-grade university

It is impossible to fault the architects of the merger of University College London (UCL) and Imperial College for the scale of their ambition: "This is about creating the world's number one university," claims Sir Derek Edwards, the provost of UCL. "This would put Oxford and Cambridge way, way behind and would put us in a strong position to rival Harvard."

Certainly the combination of these two respected institutions makes sense. Many unions between academic institutions are simply a way of artificially prolonging the life of weak institutions or are thinly disguised takeovers. The UCL/Imperial merger is in a rather different category, and both parties are approaching it as equals and from positions of individual strength. In the research rankings, Imperial came second only to Cambridge, while UCL came sixth, after, among others, Oxford, the London School of Economics and Warwick.

The new player will become one of our largest universities with 27,500 students. What's more, it should be able to reduce its overheads, rationalise its property portfolio (raising valuable funds along the way) and present an attractively wide range of well-taught courses to prospective entrants. It has at least the potential to gain the "critical mass" to become a world-class centre of learning and research.

However, Sir Derek and his counterpart at Imperial, Sir Richard Sykes, (who gained some experience of mergers in world-class companies when he was in the pharmaceutical industry), should not run away with their aspirations. Even if all of the synergies yield the returns expected, they and most other British universities will still lack the funding available to Harvard, Yale and Princeton, all of which have vast foundations. Even the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, some very wealthy, cannot come close to the wealth of the US Ivy league.

As with so many mergers of British companies in the past, the UCL/Imperial merger will create a British world-beater, even a significant player on the European and world stage. But we should be under no illusions about the gap – in funding and achievement – between our universities and those of the United States.