Young Alumni Don't Need to Be Cultivated. They Need to Be Invited.

Most advancement shops are sitting on an underleveraged population for future growth. They just haven't looked at it that way yet.

Everyone in higher ed agrees that silos are a problem. The advancement office and the career services office should talk more, share data, collaborate on alumni engagement, and stop duplicating outreach to the same people. This has been true for twenty years and the silos are still there. Structural change in higher ed moves slowly, politics are real, and platform integrations are expensive and complicated. Waiting to fix the silos is not a strategy.