Beyond collecting basic information, keeping in touch with students and understanding how they’re doing after graduation carries even more benefits, says EAB.
First, institutions can reveal positive graduate success over time as a selling point to prospective students. Furthermore, many schools are working with employers in order to best identify the skills needed to get students ready for the careers they are preparing to enter. By understanding the skills best serving graduates in the workforce, institutions can continue to produce highly prepared graduates, and teachers can make changes to programs and curricula while still maintaining the integrity of an institution’s mission.
“We are just now waking up to this issue, and have really begun working on coordinating our efforts,” said Matkin. “The Alumni Association has found that recent graduates want help finding jobs, and many alumni are willing to offer internships from their companies. We’re working on getting that sort of hand-off completed because we want our graduates to be successful, get feedback, and maintain relationships.”
“We want to make everybody aware that we do care about what happens to students after graduation,” said Matkin. “That means everything from a series of programs and services to help current students explore which career they might want to go into as undergrads, to helping graduates identify numerous pathways to continue their learning.”
Simply better understanding how graduates are doing isn’t the only way institutions are showing their commitment to lifelong career success. Though only 4 percent of respondents currently offer short-term alternative credentials such as digital badges and short-term certificates for graduates changing careers or looking to learn new skills, 50 percent of responding senior executives plan to add these customizable certificates to their portfolio in the next five years, with another 30 percent planning to offer digital badges in the same time frame.
“Universities and colleges want better ways to connect with alumni for years to come,” said EAB Practice Manager Carla Hickman. “This means offering not just surveys, but also new, intensive learning opportunities that support lifelong achievement and success of students.”
UC Irvine, for example, is currently working on setting up special communities for alumni taking various MOOCs on Coursera, in order to bring more graduates back to learn in more meaningful ways.
As far as short-term programs go, it is important that schools provide flexible, personalized options for today’s students, notes the report. This necessitates experimentation in order to best discover whether a not a certain program or discipline works best online, in-person, or as a hybrid of the two, as well as the need to keep context at all times within the growing push towards easy modularization of concepts.
“Millennials—poised to represent three-quarters of the workforce by 2025 and expected to average 20 jobs over the course of their lifetimes—are approaching professional education differently,” said Hickman. “They are seeking short-format courses and credentials for ‘just-in-time’ and ‘just enough’ education. Millennials are highly conscious of wanting to understand the benefit in anything they pursue. How will it help them at their job or to be a more attractive candidate for new opportunities?”
“It turns out that as with everything else, learning is becoming more intermixed with everyday life,” noted Matkin. “People are using mobile devices to access learning at any time or place, and it’s a commodity to have that universal access. In this changing market of the very way people learn, we want to serve students beyond the skills they merely need by honoring the contract universities have with society and with their students, which is to remain relevant to them throughout their lives.”
“Universities would like to be seen as lifelong learning partners, just as graduates would love their beloved schools to meet their needs,” concluded Hickman. “Senior professionals are so excited to think of ways to meet the needs of current and future students in order to do the most they can for their success.”
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