This originally stemmed from a post I made in the Database Managers Community Group. I have been doing data hygiene and was looking for recommendations on how to handle university/college organization accounts.
We have several duplicate university accounts, but several are different departments at said university (i.e. department of english, art, history, etc.). I want to have one main account for the university and then link the different departments to that account instead of merging them into one monster account.
The clearest solution I've come to is associating the two organization accounts (in relationships) and then making an association type that's something like "Department/University". This is what my fellow Tess users also recommended, but the issue came up that associations are a little buried in Constituent records so you have to be intentionally looking for it to see it.
I wish associations would show up in search results like affiliations do OR if organizations could be assigned primary constituents like households (and if those primaries could be other orgs). This gives more visibility to these related, secondary accounts but also helps to filter for dupes. This also goes beyond universities to corporations with smaller subsidiaries or grantmaking foundations that are related to the larger corp but need a separate account.