Something You Have, or Something You Build?
For years, colleges have sold the alumni network as one of the great benefits of attending. Look at our reach. Look at who you’ll know. Look at the doors a degree from here opens.
Brandon Busteed thinks the first rungs of the career ladder are disappearing. On the Keynote, he laid out the erosion: 8.2 million college students wanted an internship this past year, and 3.6 million got one. Teen employment started falling off a cliff around 2010. Entry-level white-collar work is now the part of the labor market most exposed to AI. The bottom of the ladder, the part graduates used to climb onto without thinking about it, is thinning out underneath them.
That changes what an alumni network is for.
A harder question sits underneath the pitch: which of those is it?
Most institutions act as though career connections surface on their own. Hold the reunions, run the affinity groups, host a few networking nights, and the relationships take care of themselves. The reach exists, so the value must be in there somewhere. The institutions producing the strongest outcomes treat relationships the way they treat fundraising and enrollment and the academic program: as infrastructure that someone owns, funds, and is accountable for.
Busteed has the data on what happens when an institution actually builds it. During his time at Gallup, the school that scored highest on alumni saying they’d had a mentor who encouraged their goals and dreams was an online, adult-serving university. Nobody would have guessed it. It had no quad, no residence halls, no homecoming weekend. What it had was full-time staff whose entire job was mentoring students. The outcome people associate with deep campus tradition came from a place with none of it, because the place decided mentoring was a function and staffed it like one.
Set that against where the engagement dollars actually go. Homecoming and reunions absorb tens of thousands of dollars a year at most institutions, sometimes more. These are real community-builders and worth keeping. But they answer a question alumni are asking less and less. Reunions ask whether you remember this place. The graduate watching the entry-level market close behind them is asking something else: is this place still useful to me now?
Those are different relationships. One runs on memory. The other runs on whether the institution shows up at the moments that matter after graduation, which are increasingly the career moments. An alumni office optimized for the first will keep reporting strong attendance numbers while the second relationship quietly goes unbuilt.
This is the gap between affiliation and connection. Affiliation comes free with the degree: you went here, so you’re one of ours, and the reunion invitation arrives on schedule. Connection has to be earned at the point of need. The Gallup mentorship finding is connection. So is a warm introduction to an alum three industries over when a graduate is trying to make a pivot. So is a mid-career alum getting a call from their school during a layoff instead of during a giving campaign. None of that emerges from a network you merely have. It comes from one someone is responsible for.
It’s worth being honest about why this is hard. The nostalgia model is easier to run and easier to measure. Attendance is a clean number. A mentoring match that pays off four years later is not. The infrastructure costs more than the events do, and the return shows up on a timeline that doesn’t fit an annual report. So the work that alumni say they want, the networking and the mentoring and the career help, stays in the category of things everyone hopes will happen on their own.
Advancement professionals already understand the underlying principle. Third-time event attendance is one of the strongest predictors of future major-gift behavior. An alum who keeps coming back is telling you something. But institutions that obsess over bringing people back for the social weekend rarely apply the same rigor to bringing them back for the thing that compounds over a career. The relationship that produces a major gift years later often starts with the institution being useful much earlier, and usefulness is increasingly about work.
Underneath nearly everything Busteed talked about was the same idea: relationships matter. From his Gallup research forward, the students who thrive are the ones who had a mentor, a real connection, a person who encouraged them. The mistake is hearing that as a student-experience problem that ends at graduation. It doesn’t end there. The alumni network is where relationship-rich is supposed to keep going, and at most institutions it stops the day the diploma is handed over.
If the early career ladder is breaking, the alumni network is one of the few structures positioned to put rungs back. Whether it can depends on whether an institution treats it as a standing asset to maintain or a list of names to mine when the campaign clock starts.
What are you doing at your institution to address the changing career?
Share your thoughts in the comments.
Dave Hail is a fundraising strategist and storyteller who works with nonprofits and institutions to design stronger donor relationships and more effective engagement strategies. His work focuses on helping teams move beyond transactional communication toward systems that support long-term connection and growth.
His perspective sits at the intersection of strategy, systems, and storytelling, with a focus on helping organizations act with greater clarity and intention.
Dave is a lifelong learner, husband and dad, and lives in Oklahoma.
Big Themes This Week
* One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.
* The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.
* “Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.
* With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.
* Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.
Team Discussion Questions
* If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?
* As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?
* What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?
* Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?
* Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?
Coming Up:
The Next Agora: Developing Leadership Presence
Our next Agora will be about these themes and more.
Title:Developing Leadership Presence: Inspire with Confidence, Credibility, and Trust
Date & Time:Friday, June 26 from 12-1 pm ET.
Speaker:Mo Cotton Kelly, Chief People Officer and Senior Vice President, Alumni Relations at the UConn Foundation.
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