The Learning Didn’t Stop — Your Invitation Did

Many of those nerds went to college — and many are your alumni.

Annie Bastida Quade

Jun 16, 2026

Brandon Busteed has spent his career studying what makes higher education work — at Gallup, at Kaplan, and now running Edconic. So, he’s earned the right to be critical when we’re falling short as a sector. He shared that the most commonly used phrase in college mission statements is “lifelong learning”. And then he asked the obvious question: what are institutions actually doing to deliver on it?

Almost nothing. The rhetoric is way ahead of the action.

Many of us witnessed that gap close during COVID. As campuses closed and in-person events were cancelled, alumni offices got creative. Live Zoom sessions, virtual interviews with notable faculty, online panels that were suddenly open to graduates everywhere regardless of geography. Alumni showed up — genuinely, consistently, in numbers that surprised a lot of advancement teams. For a brief window, the degree and that feeling of being on campus (even when you aren’t) felt alive again.

Then campuses reopened. Most alumni offices returned to the programming they had always done.

Meanwhile, a husband and wife in New York were building something universities already had the pieces to build. Ty and Felecia Freely moved to the city in 2024 not knowing anyone, and launched Lectures on Tap — an event series where professors and experts give talks at bars, followed by Q&A. Their first event featured a Columbia neuroscience professor at a Brooklyn bar. About 60 people showed up. Videos went viral. Lectures on Tap now operates in five cities, sells out venues in under an hour, and has over 400,000 Instagram followers. Profs and Pints has been running a similar model since 2017, now in ten cities. The founders of Lectures on Tap said it plainly after their first year: there are so many more nerds out there than we could have ever imagined.

Many of those nerds went to college — and many are your alumni.

A handful of institutions are starting to act on this. NYU offers alumni evening classes for $15 a session — faculty-led, in person, with drinks — which is essentially Lectures on Tap built as an alumni benefit. Wharton offers free virtual courses for all alumni each spring with live faculty sessions included. Hopkins runs noncredit Odyssey courses open to alumni with tuition remission. These are good models, but they remain in the minority — and almost exclusively at elite, well-resourced institutions. The majority of the sector hasn’t moved.

Brandon calls it the evergreen degree — the idea that a diploma should be the start of a lifelong relationship with learning rather than a four-year transaction. Most institutions aren’t there yet, but the gap between the mission statement and the reality doesn’t require a major strategic overhaul to start closing. It requires a few good decisions.

Some places to start considering:

Offer one free virtual event to all alumni — one faculty member, one big idea — as an alumni benefit.
Create intentional cultivation opportunities between your school or college’s faculty and the donors you’re trying to deepen relationships with.
Pivot a reunion event from a social gathering to something closer to a lecture series — same weekend, different energy.
Have a faculty member do a monthly social media takeover, sharing their research or recording a portion of a lecture, giving alumni a window into the intellectual life of the campus.
Host virtual monthly career panels not for students, but for alumni navigating transitions — connecting graduates to the institution at exactly the moment they most need it.

None of these require a huge budget. They require someone deciding that lifelong learning is central to the identity of your alumni community and acting on it.

What would it look like to build that for your own alumni community?

Annie Quade is an advancement strategist with more than 15 years of experience spanning major and planned gifts, alumni engagement, annual giving, talent management, and organizational design. She serves as the Associate Vice President of Advancement Strategy & Engagement at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP), where she oversees integrated engagement, talent and people operations, and the division's growth strategy — and currently provides interim leadership of the development team.

Annie began her career in frontline fundraising at the University of Missouri, first as a regional and planned giving officer and then as director for the School of Law. She is also co-founder of Advancement Talent Co., a community for advancement professionals focused on talent management and organizational strategy.

Big Themes This Week

One relationship-rich, work-integrated experience roughly doubles a graduate’s odds of a good job and lifelong engagement but it reaches fewer than a third of students. The issue isn’t whether it works; it’s that no one has scaled it.
The early rungs of the career ladder — summer jobs, internships, entry-level roles — have been eroding for a decade, and AI is now accelerating it.
“Lifelong learning” is the most common phrase in mission statements, and schools do almost nothing to deliver on it. A degree could be evergreen, not a four-year burst.
With more supply than demand, differentiation is now survival but only if an institution is authentic to its value proposition and can deliver it.
Career readiness and the liberal arts aren’t opposites. Employers want graduates who are both broadly educated and specifically skilled.

Team Discussion Questions

If work-integrated learning is this powerful, what’s actually stopping us from scaling it? Resources, buy-in, or that no one owns it?
As entry-level roles erode, what role should we and our alumni play in securing applied-learning opportunities for students?
What would treating the degree as “evergreen” look like for us, and what would have to change in how we engage alumni?
Could we name our institution’s signature in one sentence and would our alumni describe it the same way?
Where does work-integrated learning sit on our campus, and is it positioned to be core to the student experience rather than an add-on?