Mentoring programs for students and young alumni are increasingly popular in the higher education community, but they're not turning out to be all that we hope they are. Mentoring programs promise to tap into the inactive parts of our alumni networks to help students and young alumni advance their careers and engage older alumni at the same time. This promise isn't being realized.
Manufacturing Legibility: Measuring What Is Easy Is Not Measuring What Is Right
A Platform Is Not a Strategy
We all want to find complex problems to have simple solutions.
When alumni relations and career services offices go shopping for digital platforms—or try to implement other new initiatives—they tend to try just that.
Alumni engagement, alumni networking, helping new grads find the right career—these are all complex issues that platforms can help solve but can't solve on their own.
Software can be a part of your strategy, but it will never be a strategy.
Alumni Mentoring Programs: A Literature Review in 6 Articles
Alumni mentoring was the big buzzphrase in alumni relations and career services in 2016.
But the rise in such programs has some people asking, "What is mentoring anyway?" Is it a Karate Kid-style, one-on-one relationship that the institution has to set up from scratch? Or is it something more organic? What can mentees expect to get out of it, and what should mentors expect to do?
To help answer these and other questions, we picked six articles that cut past the hype and clarify what alumni mentoring programs look like at their best.
How Colorado State University Uses Alumni Career Communities to Serve Over 30,000 Students
Colleges and universities are turning to "career communities"—organized, clustered networks of alumni spread across different industries and fields—to serve their students' career needs at scales larger than ever before.
Colorado State University's Career Communities program is one shining example of the success of such a strategy. CSU's 15 career communities helps its 33,000+ students (and even more young alumni) find their way into the careers of their choosing.
Barb Richardson is Associate Director of Assessment & Strategic Initiatives at CSU's Career Center. We asked her to tell us how CSU has implemented its Career Communities program and made it a success.
Why Alumni Career Communities Matter
Why do students go to college? Most academics would be horrified to discover that it’s not to get a great education and become educated citizens of the world.
Today’s students still want high quality academics, but they take the educational benefits of college for granted. What students really expect from today’s college, as reported in the Higher Education Research Institute’s survey of incoming freshmen, is to get a leg up. Three of the top four reasons for coming to college (and the percentage of students who cited that reason) are related to careers.