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The purpose of this paper is to explain the relationship alumni may have with their institution’s library and its effect on student success, which, in turn, produces more engaged alumni.

This paper provides a base interaction model that describes this relationship.

Libraries are well positioned to not only engage current students but to establish the foundation for these students to become engaged alumni.

This base relationship model may help with advocating for secure funds of libraries and/or a higher priority for fundraising.

This practitioner paper intends to explore how Public Higher Education Institutions (PHEIs) in Pakistan could strategize alumni to encounter the financial sustainability challenges and achieve their organizational potential relevant to academic, research and public services.

Employing a hermeneutic (interpretive) phenomenological approach, this study used interviews and focus group discussion data with 26 alumni from eight different PHEIs in Pakistan to explore their attitudes toward engagement with their institutions.

This study shows a clear shift in institutional strategies between the developing and developed economies regarding the importance and value given to alumni and engagement practices employed.

This study recommends that PHEIs in Pakistan can enjoy alumni engagement benefits to strengthen their organizational standing, provided they view alumni as a valuable entity and observe a proactive approach to engage alumni in a manner that may reflect the mutually beneficial and trustworthy relationship. Further, it would help institutions attain long-term financial sustainability, which is threatened by state-funding cuts and, more recently, COVID-19 pandemic-led recession.

Scholarship shows that institutions in the developed economies have built a strong bond with their alumni to seek their support. However, the voices of institutions from the developing economies have not been heard yet. In this regard, this study appears to highlight the current alumni engagement practices and how institutions could improve on them to strategize alumni for a sustainable future.

Social media provides institutions an opportunity for a new level of engagement with prospective students, alumni, donors and community members. This chapter begins with an overview of social media in higher education, who is using it and for what, then provides a few talking points to consider with others before beginning a push into social media. The remainder of the chapter includes a few examples of ways in which social media are used to engage alumni and prospective students, including utilizing Twitter as a free SMS service to provide updates to prospective students during their recruitment, creating an iPhone application for alumni weekend as both an information and engagement tool, and using live tweets from alumni during homecoming to provide an authentic look at the day's events.

Co-curricular engagement in postsecondary education provides students with a breadth of opportunity for leadership-focused developmental experiences. However, few studies have qualitatively examined in detail how alumni describe years later how formal co-curricular involvement contributes to their development. Such lack of attention has resulted in what we describe as a “hidden leadership curriculum” embedded in co-curricular engagement. To address this gap in the literature, we explored the leadership experiences of 25 recent alumni who were engaged within various co-curricular organizations, and the leadership lessons relevant to their professional success that they report learning as a direct result of their involvement. Findings from this study reveal how the inherent organizational challenges embedded within co-curricular engagements lead students to develop a more interdependent, relational conception of effective leadership behaviors. These conceptualizations place value on collective group engagement and decision-making, and help students recognize group needs over individual desires. In addition, many participants reported acquiring the value of generativity – building a leadership pipeline - within their respective co-curricular organizations. We discuss practical implications, such as the central role of challenging experiences within the co-curriculum, and suggest future research recommendations.

This chapter provides an overview of entrepreneurship clubs. It charts the development of these organisations, as a form of extracurricular activity. It introduces different forms of entrepreneurship clubs, such as Junior Achievement (JA) and Enactus, and explains how they grew from 1919 to the present. It also illustrates the differences between self-organised clubs, organised programs using clubs as a learning method, structured societies and nationally organised cooperative societies. The second part introduces research on student clubs in entrepreneurship education. It explores the benefits of clubs. It shows that clubs assist student learning, enable the acquisition of practical skills and improve college attendance, employment opportunities and career attainment. We argue that entrepreneurship clubs have improved student learning outcomes in entrepreneurship and simulated entrepreneurial learning, while impacting student self-efficacy and intentionality as well as improving employability and social learning. The final part of the chapter provides advice and tips for educators advising student-run entrepreneurship clubs. Ultimately, the chapter explains how student clubs have developed, why they are important for student learning and how advisors can support them.

The purpose of this study is to understand the challenges faced by the higher educational institutes in imparting entrepreneurial education during the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore the institutional response to handle the difficulties posed by COVID-19 through innovative educational initiatives.

To understand the challenges faced, data was collected from entrepreneurship students and entrepreneurship educators through focus group discussions. The study followed Kitzinger (1995) as data was analyzed in its entirety as a group and then individually. Groups and individuals were the focus of the analysis. The study applies the Kepner Trego problem analysis technique (KPTA) as the problem-solving technique adopted by the institute and SAP-LAP (situation, actor, process, learning, action, performance) to discuss the findings of the study.

The study found that to engage, encourage and enable students to study on their start-up/business ideas; it is important to facilitate peer interactions, internships in start-ups and meaningful engagement with alumni entrepreneurs. Some proactive interventions are also expected from institutes to energize the student community with positivity. It is also important to nurture the emotional well-being of budding entrepreneurs.

The case study narrates the innovative and agile problem-solving approach of the business school during the pandemic. KPTA focuses more on appreciative dialogue and also helps to replicate the best from other situations to the problem areas. SAP-LAP method also helps practitioners to initiate the right new actions with targeted performance.

As a greater number of academic institutions impart entrepreneurship education today, the findings of the study would be relevant to the stakeholders, including students, educators and institutes.

The study underpins the importance of the emotional well-being of entrepreneurs/student entrepreneurs and an innovative approach to keep the student moral high during such a challenging situation.

It is an ongoing exercise at a business school where the challenges were identified, analyzed and solutions were implemented using a structured methodology such as focused group discussions, KPTA and SAPLAP. The innovative initiatives not only engaged the student well but also were able to ensure their emotional well-being.

Many undergraduates major in business in hopes of being well-prepared for a career. However, Arum and Roksa (2010) find business students perform poorly relative to peers on measures of academic gains and employers report that few college graduates are well-prepared for business careers (Lumina Foundation, 2013). Experiential courses have the potential to engage students deeply and encourage critical thinking while developing important business skills. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

This paper proposes several attributes of successful experiential courses and uses a student-managed portfolio as an example of a successful model.

Student-managed portfolios can improve educational and career outcomes for students.

Student-managed investment funds can provide a vehicle for teaching students research, critical thinking and writing skills while encouraging them to integrate knowledge from a broad range of business disciplines to understand a firm’s business model.

While experiential programs are touted as addressing these shortcomings, many academics remain skeptical of experiential programs which too often focus on showy trips, passively listening to important people or performing shallow analyses at the expense of developing a deep understanding of how to identify and solve complex problems. This paper offers some insight into important features of a successful experiential program.

Limited research exists that assesses the transfer of leadership learning from an undergraduate leadership program into alumni work environments. This study explored alumni’ valuation of an undergraduate leadership program by gaining an understanding of what leadership learning and leadership behaviors transferred into work environments. The participants were alumni that graduated from the same university in the southeastern United States, and while enrolled completed a four-year, co-curricular leadership program. Eight participant alumni engaged in semi-structured interviews as well as completed the Leadership Practices Inventory. The findings indicated that specific leadership learning did effectively transfer to work environments, and program alumni were frequently engaged in the Five Practices of Exemplary Leadership at work to some degree. When developing leadership programs, practitioners may consider incorporating similar programmatic attributes and leadership learning deemed valuable by program alumni.

This paper aims to provide students with a career edge, business students require more than concepts and calculations to be successful in their future career. They require professional skill sets, mentors, relationship guides and as much real industry experience as they can gather before graduation. This study sheds some light on how a small business school (SBS) in a nonprofit private academic institution (NPAI) located in an isolated rural area of the USA has been able to tap its strong alumni relationships to provide mentoring and experiential learning opportunities to students using its student-managed investment funds (SMIFs) as the vehicle. Although this study uses a small, geographically isolated institution, the authors believe that the approach taken by this particular school can be replicated by any academic institution that strives to enhance student learning experience by promoting mentorship and experiential learning.

This study starts with a brief introduction (Section 1) and a short review of literature (Section 2) to highlight the numerous benefits of alumni engagement and student mentorship. Section 2 shows institutional background on the NPAI, the SBS and the SMIF. The major part of the study starts with a discussion on the set of rules to guide in the construction of a student-alumni relationship framework that could be easily modified to the unique characteristics of the institution. Next, the role and responsibility of the investment advisory board (IAB) and its members’ engagement with students are discussed. In the last part of the study, SBS is used as a case study to show how alumni contribute to SBS and enhance students’ experiential learning by contributing as mentor, IAB member, advisors to the FMIF and career mentorship. This study concludes with a discussion on potential areas of conflict and friction for alumni involvement.

This study shows that SBS in a NPAI has been able to tap its strong alumni relationship to provide mentoring and experiential learning opportunities to students using its SMIF as the vehicle. The authors believe that the approach taken by this particular school can be replicated by any academic institution that strives to promote mentorship and experiential learning.

This case study is focused on a SBS in a NPAI that has a strong alumni relationship and enough resources to successfully tap on its alumni. It would be interesting to learn how this approach can be used in resource-limited public institutions.

As the case study shows, any business school that values experiential learning can rely on its alumni to enhance student learning experience by properly using its alumni resources.

The results of this study show that business schools’ outreach opportunities and student experiential learning experience can be enhanced and business schools’ academic qualification and ranking, which leads to improvement in student enrollment, can be improved. Overall, the major beneficiary would be the business schools’ immediate and larger community.

The authors are positive that multiple universities are properly taking advantage of using their alumni relationship.

The alumni event everyone needs to be at. “Am I Invited?” will focus on the initial implementation of social media as it pertains to alumni relations, along with the relevance it plays within the advancement world. Social media strategies are a creative and powerful way to connect, educate, and energize those interested in the university. This technology and change in interpersonal behavior allows us the capabilities to create a complex, tightly woven, and diverse university community – a hotbed for innovative ideas, energetic conversation and practical networking.

As the world connects in new ways, so does our student body, so do our graduates and therefore, so do our alumni. We must be able to be part of the conversations because they are happening whether we know about them or not. We need to want to be where our constituencies are getting their information if we want to be productive when trying to reach out to them. The internet has taken over newspapers as a source for world news, especially with the younger generations, and it is quickly approaching the impact of the television. “Nearly six-in-ten Americans younger than 30 (59%) say they get most of their national and international news online; an identical percentage cites television” states the Pew Research Center. The study was done with 1,489 adults over the age of 18 in December 2008.

Why a university engages with SNS is an important question. The justification of investment must be met, and a comprehensive plan for implementation of social media initiatives must be created. Delving deeper into the societal norms and beliefs that need to be institutionalized before one can be truly successful in implementing a strategic investment of time, money, and brainpower. Then looking at key examples on how others were able to be successful at using SNS for alumni relations will prove to be helpful in weaving a practical web of social media initiatives that are effective at creating a virtual community ready to share thoughts, questions and resources. The impact of the experimental uses of SNS within the context of a diverse alumni community – which connects seamlessly to emerging campus-wide initiatives, is a complex and exciting realm to participate in. Challenging one to think out-of-the-box when it comes to finding an answer that suits their specific institutional goals will hopefully inspire a creative, fun, innovative, and interactive flow of ideas, along with the courage to try new things. Be bold. Be brave. Be here. Yes, you are definitely invited!