Universities today are facing unprecedented financial challenges. For some, reductions in research funding and potential changes to indirect cost recovery have left them dealing with nine-figure budget gaps. Many are scrambling to find new sources of research support. They are sunsetting programs and services. Some are laying off hundreds of people.

But institutions can’t lose sight of student success as a priority. They do so at their peril by putting a generation of students at risk and losing a future generation of supporters. Instead, universities must prioritize the services, programs, and relationships that are a win-win by helping students succeed while also forging partnerships that fuel recruiting, advancement, and impact. 

Investing in student success is personal to us. Over her career in advancement, Nancy has worked at a number of universities with different histories of student success. She has met hundreds of alumni and she has seen how, generations after graduating, alumni remember a great faculty member or adviser, or how good the food was in the dining hall. These details matter. Investing in them today means your future generations of alumni will be generous and engaged. 

Likewise, in his career as a student success author, speaker, and consultant to more than a hundred colleges and universities, Elliot has seen the power of students finding their place, their people, and their purpose. Every day he helps universities redesign what they offer, how they are organized, and how they operate so that students can succeed. With this expertise comes appreciation for the experience he had as a student at the University of Virginia (U.S.) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (U.S.): close-knit communities, encouraging mentors, inspiring peers, unwavering support, and limitless opportunities. 

Though we share a last name, we’re not related—but we share a passion for student success. We collaborated on a chapter in Elliot’s book, The Connected College, and we see the promise of student success and the peril of not investing in it.

Students who are supported in school become alumni that support the institution. But, as all of us in advancement know, that support is in decline. While the amount of alumni donations has increased, the number of alumni donating is in decline, with only 13% participation among recent graduates—62% of which don’t give again within three years. (That’s according to the 2024 RNL National Alumni Survey and Evertrue’s 2024 First-time Donor Report, respectively.) With the number of undergraduate students taking classes fully online on the rise, alumni engagement and support is poised to get harder. While confidence in higher education is up slightly after 10 years of decline—42% of Americans are confident in it, according to a 2025 Gallup report—that’s still lower today than in 2015, when 57% of Americans reported confidence in it.

This is perhaps not surprising, since 52% of recent graduates are underemployed and the unemployment gap between college grads aged 22 to 27 and those without a degree is the narrowest it’s been in 30 years, thanks in part to artificial intelligence taking entry-level jobs, according to 2024 and 2025 reports by the think tank The Burning Glass Institute.

Given that context, the return on investment of supporting today’s students and tomorrow’s donors is critical.

Student engagement and belonging set the foundation. Alumni who feel a sense of connection to their institution are 23 times more likely to donate than those who indicate feeling disconnected, according to the RNL National Alumni Survey. Student involvement can also lead to greater alumni giving later: One analysis of 33,000 students found that students who participated in a varsity sport, Greek life, or multiple activities were twice as likely to give.

Alumni who are very or somewhat satisfied with their college experience are five times more likely to have donated to their institution than those who were not very or not at all satisfied, the RNL alumni survey revealed. Students who found career services “very helpful” are 2.6 times more likely to give back to their school as alumni than those who didn’t, according to a 2016 Gallup survey.

Here are seven ways advancement teams can keep student success in focus. 

1. Assess your alumni engagement. 

Everyone is overwhelmed by email and yet communicating with alumni relies on it. Stanford University’s Alumni Association (California, U.S.) assessed its alumni engagement so it could improve its digital outreach. Tracking everything from web and email clicks to event attendance to volunteering to club membership to giving history, the team parsed activities for about 184,000 email addresses. Then it revamped communications based on the scores, sending fewer emails, which were opened more and saw increased revenue.

Put It Into Practice:

• The CASE Insights on Alumni Engagement explores engagement across four categories. These can help teams analyze engagement and create their own engagement scores. Assign engagement scores to every prospect in your database and use this to focus efforts.
• Further target communications by leveraging generative artificial intelligence tools to personalize communications at scale. For instance, this EverTrue case study explores how the University of South Carolina (U.S.) used ChatGPT to create messages for annual giving. It saved time and boosted the number of first-time donors for the university’s giving day.
• Go beyond financial contributions to measure and tell the stories of the social and economic impact of alumni through their engagement, like the University of Manchester (U.K.) and track engagement longitudinally to spot shifts, like the University of Amsterdam (Netherlands).
   

2. Connect student and alumni journeys. 

The University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism (U.S.) Annenberg Insights Initiative connects student and alumni journeys to inform academic advising and align coursework and co-curricular activities to market demand. Annenberg uses its customer relationship management database to capture data about the courses students take, the student organizations they join, the activities they participate in (e.g., conferences and internships), and the skills they build. Then they correlate these data with each student’s eventual job title and the forecasted demand for that job title in the future.

Put It Into Practice:

• Gather “external” data beyond your walls on alumni job titles and labor market trends and then connect these with your “internal data” on courses, clubs, conferences, and other activities to improve academic programs and advising.
• Integrate alumni stories into your curriculum and communications; for example, the University of Calgary (Canada) “Start Something” campaign highlighted unconventional alumni so students sought them out for advice.
• Use alumni activities and formal alumni advisory boards like University of Michigan (U.S.) Young Alumni Council to take the pulse of alumni, understand their career trajectories, and gather their reflections on what was valuable.
• Embed your alumni office in key functions across the institution to link current and past students—including study abroad, experiential learning, admissions interviews, and career services.
   

3. Meet alumni at work. 

Building relationships means meeting with alumni where they are—not only physically but in terms of the topics they care about. Alumni don’t always want to attend a tailgate or a drinks reception. Instead, they might want to network with fellow alumni who work in their field and share similar values. IMD, the business school in Lausanne, Switzerland, connects its alumni (located in more than 180 countries around the world) through its Communities of Interest: virtual communities around specific themes such as sustainability, entrepreneurship, inclusive leadership, and even luxury. 

Put It Into Practice:

• Organize webinars or activities with industry and faculty experts—and jointly plan events with student clubs and alumni chapters to deepen engagement and effectively build communities with strong bonds.
• Make it easier for alumni to engage, with smaller scale activities; for example, the University of Auckland (New Zealand) Volunteer Hub includes a global micro-volunteering digital hub offering "bite-sized" tasks for busy alumni, such as reviewing a student’s LinkedIn profile or providing local city tips
• Figure out where your alumni already gather (such as conferences and social events) and organize showcase events there to capitalize on the alumni audience you’ll already have in one place around a shared topic. For example, the Georgia Tech (U.S.) alumni association regularly organizes events around conferences from the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
   

4. Partner with faculty to support students. 

Partnerships create win-win scenarios where innovative instruction and research garners support to scale it up. The University of Virginia (U.S.) “More Than the Score” faculty lecture series is a great example. To capitalize on the visibility and visitation at home football games, the university created the award-winning series to showcase faculty work to up to 500 guests. During the pandemic, the series continued virtually, reaching nearly 6,000 people online in 2020 and nearly 7,000 in 2021 in a hybrid format. The partnership with faculty not only drives engagement but also bridges academics and athletics.

Put It Into Practice:

• Keep faculty involved in student activities—for instance, a sports team, investment club, or specific research labs—because these evolve into alumni activities based on interest or affinity. These connections can last a lifetime and train faculty to keep advancement in the loop.
• Develop routines and rituals to help advancement keep a finger on the pulse of faculty research. For example, attend faculty onboarding sessions, invite faculty to present at your meetings, keep abreast of awards submissions, and meet regularly with your vice-president of research. For example, in California, U.S., UC San Diego’s Foundations Relations team meets with faculty early and provides resources for faculty researchers.
• Engage local communities in research with impact. The Universities for Nottingham (U.K.) Collaboratory brings together several universities, community-based organizations, and local citizens to recruit and mentor students who’ll lead community-engaged research.

5. Connect students with alumni through experiential learning. 

Washington, D.C.’s American University School of Communication’s “Career Intensives” connect students with alumni and industry professionals for immersive, week-long experiences. These intensives in major media markets like Los Angeles, California, U.S., and New York City, U.S., give students special access to alumni with networking opportunities, career path exploration, and insights into industry trends. These experiences connect the classroom and the professional world, leveraging alumni networks to provide students with tangible career development opportunities.

Put It Into Practice:

• Raise awareness among alumni about experiential learning projects using platforms like Riipen which serve as a marketplace for class projects for companies. This way alumni can hire current students to work on projects for their companies.
• Bring alumni back to campus physically and virtually as guest speakers, judges for pitch competitions, career panelists, advisors for hack-a-thon teams, and more to cultivate connections with students.
• Immerse students in professional environments and problem solving; for example, alumni from the University of Sydney (Australia) can host “immersions” where students work on-site at alumni-managed firms to tackle specific strategic hurdles and work across disciplines
   

6. Forge external partnerships. 

Building brand affinity is no easy task on a college campus. Engineering software company ANSYS partnered with Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.), naming a classroom building and providing their software. CMU students now have access to the ANSYS solution portfolio of software, enabling them to explore, simulate, and analyze solutions for real-world engineering challenges. They create prototypes in the maker space in the ANSYS Building. 

Put It Into Practice:

• Alumni and their companies often want to work with universities but don’t know where to start. Create a “front door” for corporate engagement with concrete ways to work together and specific themes such as Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Business Engagement or Imperial College London (U.K.)’s Enterprise Division.
• Look for ways to utilize products and services from alumni companies as part of your operations and in the student experience. For example, IMD’s bottled water on campus comes from an alumni-owned company.
• Create special access and partnership opportunities for alumni; for example, Technical University of Munich (Germany)’s TUM Partners of Excellence program offers companies (often led by alumni) exclusive access to campus startups and previews of the talent pipeline.
   

7. Use physical spaces to support and symbolize student success.

A 2022 Qualtrics student experience survey found 62% of students are satisfied with campus facilities. Many spaces that support students are faltering and sending future alumni the wrong message. Instead, use space to support and symbolize student success. Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S.) created a student success center within its new campus library to meet students where they are and offer help with writing, tutoring, research, and projects. The University of Rochester in New York, U.S., created its iZone innovation lab for students to work on projects with community, social, and economic impact. New York University reimagined its computer labs as creative, collaborative hubs for students to work with technology—and achieved 89% student satisfaction with the space and 93% with the technology.

Put It Into Practice:

• Planning a facilities renovation or expansion project is an opportunity to purposefully engage alumni donors, from shaping the vision to supporting specific spaces to participating in events within them once realized.
• Great spaces create meaningful memories. Gather, distill, and communicate alumni reflections on what your spaces meant to them. Then find ways to enhance and expand on these with flexibility for the future, especially as you see what’s changed since they were students.
• Bring alumni stories into spaces; for example, the University of Glasgow’s James McCune Smith Learning Hub is named after the first African American to receive a medical degree and uses "alumni icons" throughout the space to inspire current students.

Putting It All Together

History can predict the future—or we can change it. In the last few decades, the colleges and universities that didn’t invest in student success and alumni engagement have created generations of alumni who feel ambivalent about their alma maters. This is a huge challenge for gift officers who, when they can finally secure that first meeting, may be confronted with the inevitable first question: “Where have you been?”

Let’s not make the same mistake. If we want students to succeed and to build sustainable, thriving development programs, we must start on day one. Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida, U.S., offers a great example. On its move-in day, the alumni association, alongside student-athletes and staff, organizes dozens of volunteers to help new students and their families unload their cars and carry belongings into the residence halls. This provides a very tangible and immediate show of support. One parent noted, “The help was amazing... We were overwhelmed with how many people came and unloaded our car. Our car was unloaded in two minutes... Everything has been easier than we expected.”

This sense of support must continue throughout the first-year experience. An intentional, coordinated approach to making connections and providing support in the first year is no longer optional. It’s imperative. This is an important consideration among applicants and something U.S. News & World Report now ranks. 

Student success and financial support are like a flywheel. Invest today so it’s turning tomorrow—or else you’ll have a generation of students lacking the rewarding careers, lifelong friendships, and the sense of connection to your institution that can drive them to support the next generation.