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These Data Explain What Makes Young Alumni's Priorities Different

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We all know intuitively that young alumni are different than their older counterparts, but we often lack the data to explain how—or to explain what we can do about it.

Now we have some data to help.

The Alumni Attitude Study surveyed over 500,000 alumni at 200 universities and colleges between 2001–2012. The survey asked alumni of all ages questions about their giving habits and relationships with their alma maters. The data explain why young alumni giving patterns are different than those of their older peers.

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How Career Success Affects Alumni Giving, in 3 Graphs

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We make a lot of assumptions about alumni giving without the data to back them up. To help us test those assumptions, here are three graphs from rigorous surveys with hundreds of thousands of participants.

The data reveal that young alumni give at much lower rates than their more established counterparts— as many of us already know at our own institutions.

They also help us understand how we might improve those giving rates by addressing alumni's frustrations and needs.

Why Occidental College Uses Switchboard to Connect Students and Alumni

We're excited to announce our partnership with Occidental College! We've been working with Oxy for several months now but haven't had the chance to share.

Occidental's tight-knit, purpose-driven community is the perfect fit for Switchboard. The Occidental Switchboard's 700 users are proof enough of that already. We couldn't be more proud to be serving such an inspiring group of people.

Courtney Stricklin is Occidental's Assistant Director for Employer Relations at the Hameetman Career Center, and Culley Johnson is Occidental's Assistant Director for Engagement Communications. We asked them to tell us a little bit about why she's excited to see the Occidental Switchboard continue to grow.

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The Challenge—and Importance—of Intergenerational Alumni Networking

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Higher education is instrumental in generating economic and social mobility, and networking within higher education communities is essential to that process. Student-alumni networks promote the transmission of social capital across generational and class lines and are often just as important (if not more so) to graduates' success as their degree itself.

Intergenerational connections produce the most worthwhile alumni relationships because they let older alumni offer advice and opportunities to their younger, less established counterparts. Without intergenerational networks, resources can only travel laterally among alumni in the same cohort, and the potential of alumni communities is squandered.

"It is not from ourselves that we learn to be better than we are." —Wendell Berry