Institutions like Duke University and the University of Michigan are rethinking their alumni learning strategies. New models are emerging to engage learners throughout their lives and support learning communities to address the problems that matter most to individuals and society. What opportunities should institutions consider for this century, given our changing economy and the affordances of rapidly accelerating technology?

This chapter explores the strategic considerations of supporting learners in the twenty-first century and the unique role of colleges and universities—as distinct from those played by employers, government agencies, and individuals. Universities have the capacity to invest in the lifelong success of their alumni, regardless of their particular pursuits. They have long provided access to expertise and trusted alumni networks, which can now be married with learning platforms that scale. The result is a new set of opportunities to reconfigure alumni networks for the benefit of universities and the societies they serve.

A new world of work has arrived and with it challenges and opportunities to rethink how learning works for individuals and communities. Universities have an opportunity to craft a new social contract with alumni that includes a clause for perpetual learning. A modern system of perpetual learning will engage alumni in the development of learning experiences at every stage of life and career.

Engaging alumni as learners through digital platforms is an innovative development in higher education. At institutions like Duke University and the University of Michigan it is part of a broader rethinking of the university's relationship with alumni—how the institution engages them, invests in their lifelong success, and empowers them to make change for the better.

Higher education institutions must avoid simply providing more educational opportunities to those who already have them. At our institutions, we are asking: In the twenty-first century, how can we empower alumni to make a positive impact?

We must activate alumni as partners in expanding the global classroom to benefit the academic and alumni communities—and our broader society. We must call upon purpose-driven alumni to contribute to a learning commons that begins with the university but extends beyond it. To achieve this, universities should build networks that provide multiple ways for alumni to contribute as creators, curators, and community builders.

Universities have long provided alumni with access to expertise and networks. With new digital platforms we can now help alumni access and contribute to learning throughout their lives and careers. Universities that invest in the long arc of knowledge creation, dissemination, and human development will position themselves as essential institutions to meet the evolving needs of society.

Framing the need

Academic institutions rely on philanthropy to complement tuition and government funding. Alumni giving makes up approximately one quarter of the philanthropic support for U.S. higher education. But recent trends show a decline in the participation of alumni in higher education philanthropy. A recent analysis by the Council for Aid to Education showed that "In 1990, 18 percent of college and university alumni gave to their alma mater.... By 2013, that number had been cut in half to less than 9 percent—a record low and a culmination of a trend that has persisted for more than two decades." While absolute dollars given are still rising, lower participation rates are a worrying indicator of the declining health of the relationship between institutions and their alumni communities.

To reverse this trend, universities must provide a recurring source of value beyond athletics, reunions, and legacy admissions. Alumni engagement needs to shift to a source of renewable intellectual energy: a system of perpetual learning.

The need for such a system is clear:

It is by now a truism that graduates will switch jobs and careers more frequently. People already need resilience and nimbleness to pivot professionally and personally at multiple stages of life. To be successful in those pivots, alumni need new kinds of support and learning opportunities.

Too often, graduates view their relationship with their alma mater as shaped around a single, albeit foundational, exchange. Institutions can exacerbate this backward-looking perspective through excessive nostalgia and emphasis on fond memories of alma mater. But we are currently facing an opportunity to better understand and meet the lifelong and life-wide needs of alumni through a relational and communal approach to learning. This moves beyond the transactional and shifts the emphasis to the future.

The limits of learning at work

Industry brings a set of constraints on its ability to build a system of perpetual learning. Given the short-term expectations that often drive corporate decision-making and management practices, employers' interests in supporting professional development often emphasize immediate productivity and current demands for skills. Firms are not generally able to invest in human capital with the long horizons of mission-driven providers.

Similarly, regional workforce development strategies are tied to a particular geography and measure success based on their ability to grow regional skills. Without question, those motivations are important and such approaches have their merits. Such approaches are appropriate for programs that are funded with local and state taxes. But they are nonetheless conditioned on—and limited by—where a learner works and lives.

Still another consideration is the rise of the gig economy. As freelancers make up more of the professional workforce, many do not have access to corporate training. Freelancers' professional development is largely in their own hands.

Within those contexts, key questions emerge for academic leaders. What role should colleges and universities play in building and providing this system of learning? How are universities positioned, relative to other educational providers, to offer something differentiated to alumni and the wider community? What is their comparative advantage relative to corporate learning and development departments, bootcamps, and other alternative providers?

The role of higher education

At one level, engaging alumni through learning seems straightforward. Alumni already associate academic institutions with education. There is a continuity with the existing way alumni think about the academy. But that belies a deeper reason why universities are well positioned to invest in alumni learning.

Universities are invested in the lifelong success of alumni in ways that are different from other learning providers. Universities take a long view of professional and personal success and lead with ethical frameworks and human skills that stand the test of time while weaving in opportunities to inquire important just-in-time skills. The college president's calculation is different from the CEO's or mayor's: We invested in you as a student. We now hope to engage you in a mutual value exchange where you provide intellectual energy to fuel a dynamic network and we continue to provide flexible, affordable, and relevant learning experiences to position you for long-term flexibility and success.

Many corporate tuition reimbursement and professional development programs require employees to demonstrate how the choices they've made, and the lessons they've learned, apply to their current job. But how do you support the employee learner looking for a change? How can employee learners benefit from learning opportunities that stretch beyond competencies and skills tied explicitly to their current position? That gap can be filled with a higher education-led system of perpetual learning that harmonizes opportunities to obtain and apply human and technical skills.

Colleges and universities have a unique relationship with alumni that is different from the relationships they have with their employers or other learning providers. They already have distributed alumni networks, and are not regionally bound in the way that local government agencies or community-based organizations might be. Municipalities are not able to invest in human capital with the geographic agnosticism of national and global institutions.

What makes higher education different is not just the relationship that institutions have with their communities, including alumni. It is also about their values and approaches. Relative to other educational providers, universities have comparative expertise when it comes to designing evidence-based learning experiences. University curricula invest in combinations of breadth and depth of options to meet learner needs at multiple levels. And they are motivated to support diverse, equitable, and inclusive learning communities that provide unequaled opportunities to understand a relevant set of problems and acquire new skills. Universities are uniquely positioned to support perpetual learning.

New models

We are proposing to build on the past work that universities have done to engage alumni in learning and to ally with alumni associations and support their efforts.

Certain kinds of learning lend themselves to the system of perpetual learning we envision. It is not necessarily appropriate for all topics and all knowledge areas. The highest value learning experiences that institutions can offer their alumni are those that support life and career pivots.

Examples of such pivots include transitioning back to the workforce after having children, managing professional burnout and personal well-being, shifting employment from one industry to another, and managing retirement. What these themes have in common is that they are moments when alumni can benefit from the unique advantages that universities have as providers of perpetual learning—specifically, expertise and networks.

Expertise means universities can help alumni understand the frameworks of a new field. It means helping alumni identify their personal blind spots and learn the things they didn't know they needed to learn. That cannot happen in a purely consumer model, where a person learns precisely the things that they search and click on. There is a level of ignorance that everyone has as a novice in a field that requires expert guidance in order to understand the contours of that field. That expertise can come from the faculty or combinations of faculty and practitioners.

The University of Michigan's Center for Academic Innovation developed a "just-in-time" approach to sharing expert frameworks from faculty in response to current events. The Teach-Out Series brings together people from around the world to learn about, discuss, and address important topics in society. Teach-Outs are global community learning events designed in response to a growing need for new modes of teaching, learning, and connecting in an increasingly digital society. They represent an important effort to reimagine how universities can engage with the global public and create engaged learning experiences with diverse learners.

Teach-Outs connect scholars with engaged citizens and bridge the gap between digital and physical communities. For alumni learners, Teach-Outs provide an opportunity to engage with a geographically distributed network of University of Michigan learners at any time. They offer scale and multidirectional interaction around topics of widespread interest. Alumni can access expert frameworks through live events and archived content made available through Michigan Online. They can also leverage the flexible learning design of Teach-Outs to share their own expertise with other Teach-Out participants.

Michigan is building these learning experiences organically, for diverse communities to engage, level-up their understanding, and help each other to see new opportunities for positive impact. Recent examples include Teach-Outs on the opioid crisis, gun violence, free speech, self-driving cars, hurricanes, gerrymandering, and many more.

Through the Teach-Out model, a digital era response to the Teach-Ins which originated at the University of Michigan in the 1960s, global problem-solving communities form quickly. They are interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and interprofessional. The result is multidirectional engagement, communities forming and learning from each other, and elevated public discourse. Alumni and other learners can access these free learning experiences as live events and also utilize the content and resources to facilitate further learning in their own personal and professional communities.

After launching the new model in 2017, U-M created a Teach-Out Academy and invited other institutions to adopt and improve upon the Teach-Out approach. Notre Dame University, the University of Leiden, and Emory University have already launched Teach-Outs of their own and many other institutions are exploring Teach-Outs to provide perpetual learning opportunities to their communities. Participants are learning with and from each other, counteracting digital polarization, and engaging around topics of societal significance.

Networks complement the kind of expertise that faculty can offer. They allow someone initiating a life pivot to recognize that they are not on their own and that others have made similar changes. Well-managed networks inform choices with data and connect people with others who are willing to help. Online tools have made global networking more manageable. Universities need not be confined to place-based events to build and strengthen alumni networks. We can support alumni networking needs globally with tools like PeopleGrove, Slack, LinkedIn, Zoom and other resources.

Duke recently developed an alumni-learning experience that demonstrates the potential of this paradigm. Launched in the fall of 2019, "Intentional Life Design for Physicians: Tools to Recover Your Calling" is a 5-week course for working physicians and physician leaders to empower them to improve how they experience their work. The course is based on an evidence-based cognitive behavior therapy approach that has been shown in peer-reviewed research to reduce burnout and increase work satisfaction.

While there are many classes and resources about managing burnout through strategies like relaxation techniques, this course takes a different approach. Using a coaching framework as a guide, physicians examine the gap between where they are and where they want to be in life. Through on-demand short lectures, case studies, live video discussions on Zoom, and exercises (created with physicians' schedules and needs in mind) participants develop skills for responding differently to the challenges of practicing modern medicine. They use proven tools to candidly assess how they currently experience their work; learn response skills for managing stressors and road blocks on the job; reconnect with what makes practicing medicine meaningful; identify specific steps to make meaningful change; and create a personalized action plan that aligns with their values.

A 2019 pilot of the course with the alumni community served as a springboard to a wider rollout beyond Duke alumni to other physicians. Our hope is that initial alumni participants can become discussion leaders to help extend the impact of the course to the wider medical community.

Imagining a new social contract with alumni

Colleges and universities now have the chance to support alumni through life and career pivots by combining infusions of expert frameworks with trusted communities of learners. Reinvigorated by a new social contract, alumni are activated and, when networked, provide a powerful source of renewable intellectual energy. There is an opportunity to scale the best forms of alumni learning and engagement to be more global, accessible, and inclusive. As campus communities become more diverse across all dimensions, colleges and universities must anticipate and adapt to the needs of these individuals and communities as alumni.

In consideration of the unique missions and strengths of higher education institutions, and the evolving needs of alumni learners, a new social contract should include:

Colleges and universities plan for the perpetual time horizon. They are able to build a system of perpetual learning that others cannot. From an institutional perspective, developing perpetual learning models requires new partnerships within and beyond campuses. Universities need to embrace new methods of instruction unbound from the credit-hour and connected more clearly to just-in-time, applied, and relevant learning opportunities. From a learner perspective, alumni learning opportunities are an invitation to remain part of the learning community beyond the degree, and to treat graduation as a true commencement of a life of learning and sharing of knowledge.

Realizing the perpetual learning vision would be good for students. It would take the pressure off students to learn everything, and do everything, during their relatively compressed years on campus. That might reduce skills anxiety ("I need to major in CS") and "FOMO" (fear of missing out) by reassuring them that joining a college or university community is the beginning— not the end—of their learning journey. Indeed, some kinds of learning, such as courses in leadership, might best be offered "just in time," later in life, when alums step into leadership roles.

Everyone is going to need support from institutions as disruptions become more frequent and economic and social life become more volatile. Society needs strategies to help people build resilience and thrive. By providing access to expertise and networked learning communities, higher education is uniquely positioned to be the source of lifelong educational support.

Matthew Rascoff is the associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University. James DeVaney is associate vice provost for academic innovation and founding executive director of the Center for Academic Innovation at the University of Michigan.