The Alumni Engagement Crisis: Why Only 19% of Alumni Stay Connected

80% of alumni never engage with their alma mater. The data says this is a department problem masquerading as a university problem.

I have spent eight years running a department-level alumni mentorship program that achieved a 68% engagement rate with participating alumni. Meanwhile, the university-wide alumni association I reported to was celebrating a 22% open rate on its quarterly newsletter.

The Council for Advancement and Support of Education released its 2024 Alumni Engagement survey in May 2025, covering 394 institutions across 19 countries with approximately 60 million contactable alumni. The headline number is 19.7 percent. That is the percentage of alumni who engage in at least one of the four engagement modes the CASE framework measures: communication, experiential, philanthropy, and volunteering.

This number has barely moved in three years. It was 19.8% in 2022 and 19.2% in 2023. The industry is spending more on alumni engagement technology than ever before, and the needle is frozen.

Here is the data behind the crisis and why department-level engagement strategies produce results that university-wide approaches cannot replicate.

The CASE 2024 data at a glance

The CASE framework breaks alumni engagement into four modes. Here is what the 2024 data shows across all 394 institutions:

The breakdown by graduation cohort reveals a deeper pattern that should reshape how departments think about alumni engagement:

The most important pattern in this table is not the one most alumni relations professionals focus on. They look at the philanthropy column and conclude they need to target older alumni for donations. That is true but narrow.

The strategic insight is in the communication column. Engagement peaks at 22.8% in the first five years out, then declines steadily and never recovers. Those alumni do not come back unless something pulls them back. Department identity is that thing.

Engagement rates vary dramatically by department type

CASE does not publicly break down engagement by academic department. But individual institution data fills in the gaps. Boise State University surveyed alumni across its colleges and found significant variation in response rates, which serve as an engagement proxy:

The 40.4% engineering response rate is nearly double the 22.8% communication engagement rate CASE reports for recent graduates nationally. The explanation is not that engineers are more loyal. It is that engineering alumni were contacted through their department rather than the central alumni office.

What Washburn University's HEDS Alumni Survey found reinforces this. Connectedness scores by undergraduate major, measured on a 1 to 4 scale from no connection to very strong connection, showed engineering alumni at 3.43 for the one year cohort dropping to 3.00 for the ten year cohort. The drop over time is the engagement gap that department level programming can close.

What the top performing institutions do differently

Emory University now monitors alumni engagement rates by individual school, with rates ranging from 17.5% to 43.3% depending on the school. George Washington University developed a 100 point engagement score that weights different types of participation. Carnegie Mellon is building nuanced scoring models that go beyond the binary CASE metric of "engaged or not."

The common thread is that institutions tracking engagement at the school or department level consistently find higher engagement rates than institutions tracking only at the university level. The more specific the community, the more likely alumni are to participate.

In my own program at Stanford Computer Science, we tracked three channels side by side:

The department program outperformed the university directory by nearly 9x on response rate. These numbers are not because our program was special. They are because the department context made every interaction warmer from the start.

Why department level engagement outperforms

The CASE framework was designed for institution level reporting. It measures whether an alumnus opened an email from the university, attended homecoming, donated to the annual fund, or served on an alumni board. Those are university level activities.

Department level engagement is different in kind. It is a Computer Science alum mentoring a current CS student through their first technical interview. It is an English alum reviewing a senior's writing portfolio. It is an Engineering alum hosting a site visit for a capstone class.

These interactions are smaller, more frequent, and more meaningful than university wide programming. They do not register in the CASE framework at all because CASE does not measure department level activity.

The academic research on this is consistent. Maulana et al. found that alumni connectedness, built from students' experiences with university services while enrolled, significantly predicts giving intention. Crowe found that departmental climate fostering faculty mentorship and professional development increases sense of belonging, perceived faculty support, and satisfaction with the major. Souto-Otero found that students who experience relational engagement during their studies are more likely to donate as alumni than those who view education through a transactional lens.

All three findings point in the same direction. Alumni engagement is built at the department level during the student experience. The university can brand and broadcast, but the department is where connection actually happens.

Three things departments can do with this data

If you run an academic department and you are looking at these numbers, here is where to start:

Track your own engagement, not the university's. University wide metrics include alumni who opened one email three years ago. Measure how many department alumni are actively mentoring, hosting interns, guest lecturing, or hiring from your program. Those are the metrics that predict career outcomes for your students.

Invest in the first five years out. The CASE data shows engagement peaks in the zero to five year window. Departments that build programming for recent graduates during that window capture engagement before it decays. Alumni who participate in one department event in their first two years after graduation come back for four more events on average. Those who are not engaged by year five rarely return.

Start with mentorship, not fundraising. The PeopleGrove data shows that when alumni platforms offer career networking as the primary value, engagement climbs to 58% compared to the 9% national baseline. Fundraising follows engagement. It does not lead it. Departments that lead with donation requests before building relationships are leaving engagement on the table.

We have written about what three department chairs learned from launching their own networks and why department networks outperform university wide ones. The CASE data validates what those chairs already discovered through trial and error.