What if our role is not to recreate the classroom after graduation, but to create opportunities for alumni to continue learning with, from, and alongside one another throughout their lives?
When alumni engagement professionals talk about lifelong learning, our minds often go to familiar places, faculty lectures, continuing education, webinars, or panels featuring experts on our campus. These are valuable offerings that reinforce higher education’s great strengths, its ability to generate and share knowledge. But I wonder if we’ve unintentionally defined lifelong learning too narrowly.
That question has stayed with me throughout my first year in alumni engagement.
Before transitioning into alumni engagement, I spent much of my career in higher education in career services and experiential education, where learning was not confined to classrooms, it happened through internships, research projects, professional challenges, and reflection. Those experiences shaped students just as greatly was coursework did. When I moved into alumni engagement, I brought that perspective with me, and I began noticing that alumni continue to learn in many of those same ways long after graduation.
One experience challenged my own assumptions.
At the institution I currently serve, we launched a service in the summer event inspired by our intentional focus on educating for service. As I watched alumni serve together, I realized the impact extended far beyond giving back. They shared stories about their careers, reflected on why service still mattered to them years after graduation, exchanged ideas about their communities, and encouraged one another. I realized while we were not gathered in a classroom, meaning learning was still happening.
It made me ask: What if lifelong learning in alumni engagement is not about recreating the classroom after commencement? What if it is about creating opportunities for alumni to continue learning with, from, and alongside one another throughout their lives?
This is not an argument against academic programming. Faculty expertise, research, and continuing education remain important. Rather it is an invitation to broaden how we think about learning itself.
Learning does not happen exclusively through formal instruction in a classroom. It also develops through experience, reflection, dialogue, mentorship, and service. Experiential learning theory reminds us that meaningful learning occurs when people engage in experiences and intentionally reflect on them. Alumni engagement creates countless opportunities for exactly that kind of learning, through mentoring, service, leadership, storytelling, and shared experiences that deepen both knowledge and connection.
Alumni do not leave those ways of learning behind when they graduate. Perhaps learning in alumni engagement can be understood as any experience that helps alumni gain new knowledge, develop new skills, or see themselves, others, and the world from a different perspective. Viewing it this way, learning is already happening across many of the experience’s alumni are a part of.
A recent graduate navigating a first promotion learns from an alumnus who spent decades leading teams. A volunteer mentoring current students gains fresh insight into their own leadership style. Alumni participating in a community service project deepen their understanding of the communities they serve while reconnecting with their institutions mission. A reunion conversation between classmates becomes an opportunity to reflect on shared experiences, changing identities, and the unexpected paths life has taken them. None of these moments resemble a classroom. Yet learning can take place at all of them.
I have challenged myself to think about lifelong learning in alumni engagement through four different categories that often overlap.
This first is intellectual learning, the traditional academic experiences many of us immediately associate with. Lectures, research presentations, continuing education. These remain valuable ways for alumni to engage with ideas and continue to learn and adapt.
The second is professional learning. Alumni continue to develop throughout their careers, whether they are changing industries, leading organizations, launching businesses, or mentoring others. Alumni engagement professionals in collaboration with other campus and community partners can create spaces where those experiences are shared across generations benefiting both the alumni and current learners.
The third is civic learning. Many institutions encourage students to become engaged in the communities around them. Why should that expectation end at graduation? Service opportunities, volunteer leadership, and community partnerships allow alumni to continue learning through action while strengthening their connection both to their alma mater and their communities.
Finally, there is personal learning. Life continually invites us into new seasons, becoming a parent, caring for aging parents, navigating retirement, building resilience after setbacks, discovering new passions, or redefining our purpose. These experiences may never appear on a course catalog, but they often become the most transformative learning experiences. Alumni engagement has an opportunity to provide meaningful spaces to explore these transitions together. Viewing lifelong learning through these broader categories also changes the questions we ask alumni engagement professionals.
Instead of asking, How can we add learning to this event?
Perhaps we should ask, Where is learning already happening, and how can we intentionally create more opportunities for it?
Maybe this broader understanding of learning also challenges how we measure success. If mentoring, service, storytelling, and meaningful conversations are forms of learning, then they are not simply engagement activities, they are educational outcomes.
That shift moves alumni engagement simply beyond delivering content. It positions us as facilitators of relationships, conversations, service, and shared experiences where learning naturally occurs. Alumni themselves carry decades of expertise, lived experience, and wisdom. One of our greatest opportunities is to not just share knowledge from our institutions to alumni, but to create opportunities where alumni can generously share that knowledge with one another and across generations and different life stages.
Many institutions promise more than four years of education. They aspire to prepare graduates for lives of purpose, leadership, citizenship, and service. If that mission truly extends beyond commencement, then alumni engagement is more than maintaining relationships, or increasing attendance at events. It becomes an extension of the institution’s educational mission, a way of supporting alumni as they continue to grow, contribute, and learn throughout their lives.
If we believe education has the potential to transform lives, then perhaps alumni engagement is not simply about helping graduates stay connected to their institutions, perhaps it is about ensuring they never stop learning and growing because of it.
Rebekah Harriger is the Director of Alumni Engagement and CEO of the Elizabethtown College Alumni Association. She has worked in higher education since 2016, with nearly a decade of experience spanning career services, experiential learning, and alumni engagement. Her work centers on helping students, alumni, and professionals articulate the value of their experiences, build confidence, and pursue meaningful career pathways.
Prior to her current role, Rebekah served as the Senior Director of Career Services and Experiential Learning at Harrisburg University of Science and Technology, where she led campus‑wide career readiness and experiential learning initiatives that aligned student learning with workforce needs.
In her current role, Rebekah brings a strategic and relational lens to alumni engagement, leading efforts to strengthen lifelong connections, cultivate alumni involvement, and inspire graduates to give back through service, philanthropy, and connect with current students.
Upcoming Member Events
Agora
Behind the Scenes of a Signature Alumni Event: Lessons from the Bentley Alumni Conference
A great alumni conference can do more than bring people together — it can create the conditions for relationships to grow, alumni expertise to strengthen the institution, and university priorities to become meaningful and relevant to graduates.
In this Agora, Allison Kerivan, Executive Director of Advancement Relations, will take attendees behind the scenes of the Bentley Alumni Conference, the university’s flagship professional development and networking experience, and share how it has evolved into a strategic platform for alumni engagement and donor cultivation.
Date: Thursday, September 3 from 12 - 1 pm
Faculty-in-Residence
For six weeks beginning August 17 - September 25, Speaking Engagement welcomes Mallory Erickson — executive coach, creator and host of the What the Fundraising podcast, and author of the book by the same name — as our inaugural resident.
We’ll have a final live Symposium event for members on September 23.
