alumni futures

Antioch Alumni and the "Angry Wake"

[Updated July 28, 2007 - added link to news about President Lawry's resignation]

You have probably heard that Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio will close its doors in 2008, citing a "lack of money and students." The effect on faculty, students and staff is obvious. But what about the largest permanent constituency - the alumni?

The Chronicle's Andrew Mytelka recently wrote about reunions on campus, a week after the Trustees' announcement about the closing. He described the reunion as "an angry wake" and wrote that

the missionary zeal and counterculture ethos that made alumni so passionate about their alma mater also appear to have played a major role in driving the liberal-arts college into the ground, with minimal fund raising, a minuscule endowment...and a diffusion of energy and resources into branch campuses that eventually came to outdo the parent.

When campus administrators tried to explain to reunioning alumni the institution's needs and shortcomings (facilities, student enrollment, endowment),

[a]ngry alumni hissed, hooted, and jeered in response. They asked why the college had never seemed to seek their help.

Most of us in alumni relations are accustomed to alumni claims (rarely true) that "the only time" their school contacts them is when it's asking for money. Antioch's desperate circumstances are unfortunate, yet it's almost refreshing to hear alumni complain that they were never asked to donate. Too bad that in this case it's just too late.

Additional reading:

Antioch's June 12, 2007 press release about its closing.

"Save Antioch" web site - alumni & others mobilizing to stop the school closure.

Chronicle follow up about alumni fundraising efforts at Antioch

Antioch alumni seek split between college and university

Antioch College president resigns

LinkedIn Reacts to Facebook Platform (updated)

(Updated June 28, see below. I will continue adding links to other discussions of this topic at the bottom of this posting.)

Mashable.com, a social networking news site, reports that LinkedIn is going to follow in the footsteps of Facebook. The site says LinkedIn will provide users with the opportunity to customize their profiles with a variety of different programs, built by third-party developers. This will entail making available so-called open APIs - "application  programming interfaces" - that let the site use information from other applications (computer programs written by third-party developers). Facebook added this capability in the last couple of months and the site's growth rate has increased accordingly.

Mashable reports:

realizing it could lose its dominant position in business networking if it doesn’t act, founder and Chairman Reid Hoffman said on Friday that LinkedIn will provide open APIs “within 9 months”. Most likely, it’ll be much sooner (and it’ll need to be - 9 months is a long, long time on the web).

From a business standpoint, this is probably a necessary move. From a usability standpoint, it will probably make LinkedIn's relatively spartan profiles look more like other sites. I'm sure the very first module provided will be one that lets you display your photo, or leave messages on the site for other users.

More broadly, this move may provide organizations that use LinkedIn for Groups, such as alumni associations, with tools that help them manage and measure their groups' performance. As I wrote here in May, LinkedIn provides almost no useful metrics about groups' members or their networking behavior.

Group sponsors want more info about how alumni are using LinkedIn and whether it's working. Will we get that info? Fingers crossed.

UPDATE:

After (literally) sleeping on this posting after writing it late last night, it occurs to me that metrics about our alumni in these social network sites need not depend on formal alumni groups. Almost every member of Facebook has the View Friends feature enabled (it's the default). I can view your friends as a global group, or by "network" (such as your college or university). So finding out how many of a user's friends are from the same alumni association is literally three clicks - and ten seconds - away in Facebook. This network-centric search for your connections should be enabled someday in LinkedIn, even in the absence of official groups.

Another way for us to start learning about our alumni and their uses of these networking sites.

Mario Sundar's "LinkedIn Community Evangelist" posting about this topic

Download Squad's more skeptical treatment of the same topic

TechCrunch provides its take on the LinkedIn plans

Scott Allen discusses why people switch social network sites

LinkedIn explains why LinkedIn is great

Alumni and Legacy Admissions

Note to Alumni Futures' readers: Starting June 18 I will be posting on Alumni Futures once per week (Mondays) for the rest of the summer, with occasional exceptions - more often if something newsworthy happens, and not at all when I go on vacation.

I recently asked a former alumni relations colleague, Bill Caskey, for his perspective on the role of alumni in undergraduate admissions. Bill was an Ivy League admission officer, was director of an on-campus alumni college advising program, and is now an independent college admission consultant. He said one topic's been on his mind for a while: irate alumni whose child was denied admission by alma mater.

Bill sums up the problem this way:

Universities regularly face the challenge of admission and irate alumni. Schools develop programs to counsel alumni families and they fret over potential lost donations. I believe that in the end these efforts are largely wasted. Most alumni will return to the fold anyway once they cool down and realize their child's life has not been ruined. In other words, human nature is to forgive and forget.

So Bill's advice to advancement professionals is that the legacy hurdle is neither as large nor as financially devastating as many believe. In short, "there are better ways to dedicate resources" than  by creating alumni admissions counseling programs.

The source for all the alumni angst is the increased competition for elite college admission. As Bill points out:

• The number of high school graduates has grown by 35 percent over the last decade.
• More high school seniors are choosing to attend four-year colleges.
• They are applying to more schools than ever before. 

On this last point, Caskey quotes some stats: 72% of college applicants are submitting apps to more than three schools. That's a 20% increase in the last decade. And the number of seniors submitting six or more applications was up 41% between 1994 and 2004.

Back to legacies. If "forgive and forget" is the eventual outcome, it's the flip side of another human trait: alumni willingness to suspend disbelief when estimating Junior's chances of being admitted at Alma Mater. And even if he's rejected, the alumni have a facile explanation, says Caskey:

If our children don't get in, we'll say it proves that the school has become a bureaucratic institution that sacrifices allegiance in favor of statistics. Alumni resign from the boards of local alumni clubs and refuse to "give another dime."

And most alumni will not be placated in the short run. As an alumni admission counselor, says Caskey,

there was little I could do other than listen sympathetically and recognize that the angry parents would likely rejoin the alumni community. Once they cooled off, most saw that their child had survived, and they realized that their wunderkind didn't care nearly as much about attending their beloved alma mater as they had.

Meanwhile, Inside Higher Ed reports on a study supporting the conventional perception that alumni increase their donations to alma mater to aid a child's application for admission.

Bill Caskey is the founder of AdmissionReady and serves as an independent college admission consultant. He can be reached at [email protected].

Identity Management: The Basics for Alumni Offices

[Updated July 10, 2007 with link to Brian Hawkins article on Identity Management]

"Anybody who has an identity problem had better wise up and get with the program!”
Jack Handey

I mentioned earlier that I'll be giving a talk at CASE's Advancement Summit next month about the topic of "identity management" in higher ed. Here's my quick version of

• what Identity Management is.
• why it matters.
• what to know about it.

Last November I was a panelist at a meeting hosted by EDUCAUSE, with fellow higher ed administrators (many in non-technical jobs, like mine). There was a wide variety of professions represented: advancement, business services, registrars, student affairs, admissions, financial aid, general counsel and others. It was eye-opening for me. I left the meeting believing that Identity Management is an area for advancement managers to know more about.

What it is
Identity management is a set of guidelines and systems that allow institutions to be sure that individuals (such as alumni)

1. are who they say they are ("authentication"), and
2. have access only to the resources they are entitled to ("authorization"),

while private or confidential information stays safe from prying eyes.

Why it matters
You manage identities in order to control the interaction of people and information in your systems. Some examples:

• You have a password protected online directory, and you want alumni to be able to log in and change their own info, but not each others'.
• You want regional volunteers to have access to lists of alumni in their city, reunion volunteers to have access to lists of classmates, and admissions volunteers to have access to lists of alumni interviewers. But you don't want these volunteers to have access to each others' lists.
• You want alumni to be able to log in and search the library catalog, post a class note, register for reunion or purchase football tickets - but only if they are members of your association.
• You want annual members to be able to renew, or to upgrade to a life membership and pay their dues - all online.

What to know about it

• Identity management is not a "technical topic" of interest only to database managers and systems administrators.
• It is a non-technical policy area and a strategy concern.
• Alumni and development managers should be able to talk knowledgeably about it.
• We should also have "a seat at the table" when policy is being set.

By representing our needs and those of alumni, we can help ensure that our institutions are taking advantage of online opportunities while minimizing risks to privacy.

Some people say that this is just a common sense approach to something we have always had to do. Others see it as a management discipline with its own standards and best practices. Either way, alumni and development professionals must at least keep current on how data is protected, used and updated for the benefit of our alumni, our donors and our institutions.

Read up on the subject, and if you're heading to CASE's Summit, stop by my session and say hello.

Article by EDUCAUSE President Brian Hawkins

Report on the 2006 Identity Management Summit

General Listing of EDUCAUSE Resources on Identity Management

Google's International Education Move

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google being poised to enter the U.S. campus and alumni e-mail market. Apparently, it's not just American campuses that Google has in its sights. The BBC is reporting that Google is implementing its "Google Apps for Education" strategy internationally:

BBC item about Google's e-mail for universities.

Google is moving aggressively, as expected, even as its privacy practices come under fire from the group Privacy International. London-based PI reported recently that Google has "the worst privacy practices" of any large internet firm. PI also claims that Google has been conducting a pre-emptive "smear campaign" in the media in order to discredit PI over its criticism of Google.

Stay tuned. It's all just getting started.

3 Implications of Alumni Attachment & Social Networks

Attachment, Decay and Social Network is a paper published in 2001 by Dr. Ronald S. Burt, Hobart W. Williams Professor of Sociology and Strategy at the University of Chicago's Graduate School of Business (GSB). Dr. Burt conducted an extensive survey of GSB alumnae; details of his research methodology, a pre-print PDF of the article, and more information about the theories and hypotheses underlying his work are available from the links below.

The paper is peppered with insights into the roots, measurement, and characteristics of alumni affinity. For example, Dr. Burt discusses

• similarities between alumni relations and customer loyalty in marketing;
• why "service matters as much as or more than product value";
• how fast alumni "core contacts" decline over time; and
• the effect of geographic mobility on alumnae attachment to the school ("alumnae who moved many states away are no less attached [to alma mater] than alumnae who moved one state away").

As expected, attachment to the institution declines over time, but connections with other graduates inhibit the erosion of alumni affinity. Dr. Burt explains the sources of variance in attachment according to several factors:

• 4% of variance comes from connections embedded in the alumna's family;
• 13% comes from work connections with other alumni;
• 61% comes from connections that pre-date graduation from GSB.

Decay is remarkably robust to events after graduation....An alumna's attachment today was largely determined while she was in school.

Three Practical Implications of this research:

1. "The time to build attachments is while the student is enrolled (as opposed to hoping that alumnae can be recovered after they graduate)";
2. "Embed the attachment in other stable relationships"...(recruit applicants from among relatives and close friends of alumni, or applicants from communities that harbor many alumni already - such as companies that hire alumni in large numbers);
3. "Create emotional experiences at university that encourage interpersonal relationships" such as bonding through shared experiential programs, group initiatives, orientation, or campus traditions - thereby exposing groups of students to the same experiences simultaneously.

Attachment, Decay and Social Network appeared in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, vol. 22, issue vi, (September 2001), pp. 619-643.

• Download a pre-print version of the article [PDF]
• Information about Ronald S. Burt

Alumni Futures' First Four Months

It's been four months since I posted the first message on Alumni Futures and today I am posting this short "thank you" to all who have participated as readers, advocates or commenters in the blog's first 1/3 of a year. Here are some highlights about the blog:

• Alumni Futures has more than 200 subscribers who read the feed automatically, either via email or RSS.
• Alumni Futures averaged 22 unique visitors a day in May, 2/3 of whom were first-time viewers of the site. Half of them came directly to the site, 9% from search results (mostly on Google), and the rest from clicking through via other sites.
• Alumni Futures has received visits from 20 countries around the world, including Brunei, Singapore, Israel, Norway, Viet Nam and Spain.
• Alumni Futures has had about 4,500 individual page views since February 7, 2007.
• Alumni Futures has created connections between great new sources of information from development, alumni relations, admissions, public/media relations and the academic fields as well.

I'd love to see more comments from readers. If you have a response (pro or con) to anything you read, come to the web site and scroll down the page til you see the Comments section. Type your comment and click Submit. It's simple.

So thank you to all who have stopped by in the first four months - and thank you to Michael Stoner for hosting me as a guest blogger in April.

If you have ideas, feedback or suggestions for Alumni Futures, send them my way: [email protected].