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Nittany Lions as lifelong learners By Celena E. Kusch
Diane Ryan is executive director of the Penn State Alumni Association. Did you know? Alumni Education is projecting a more than 50-percent increase in the number of alumni participating in its activities this year. The number of alumni who receive information about Alumni Education or Outreach and Cooperative Extension events increased by more than 290 percent in the past year. Alumni Education received a Bronze Award for Logo Integration from the Marketing and Promotion Division of the University Continuing Education Association. Alumni Education will be mentioned as a resource in the upcoming Library of Congress Desk Reference for the American Civil War. This honor is a result of the highly popular Civil War Battlefield Tours, which run each fall.	Despite hundreds of reports touting the expected avalanche of returning adult and lifelong learners, the learners of the future are a slippery group. They study part-time, work full-time, seek applied knowledge, have families, shop for flexibility, live across the nation and around the world, and fall through the cracks of all but the most targeted recruitment mechanisms.   Among the ranks of these potential learners, however, Diane Ryan, sees many familiar faces. As executive director of the Penn State Alumni Association, Ryan knows that for many alumni, educational needs do not end with graduation. She plans to build on existing alumni connections to provide important educational services and to support the University’s mission of teaching, research and service.   Ryan offered her vision of the future of alumni education at Penn State: “I see the alumni association serving as a doorway through which alumni pursue lifelong education and through which that education is made available around the globe,” she said.   “Right now the focus is on specialized programs,” she added. “I want that focus to change.” Small programs have been successful for the University and alumni participants, Ryan noted, but the Alumni Association must add to them in both scope and scale if it hopes to meet future education demand.   The Penn State Alumni Association is the largest dues-paying alumni association in the country. More than 140,000 Penn Staters are currently enrolled as members. If only one-third of them completed the equivalent of one college course per semester — approximately the amount of course work expertspredict will be necessary to keep up with future changes in the workplace — alumni learners would number on a par with University Park students and nearly double current Distance Education enrollments.   But, Ryan pointed out, alumni need more than past affiliation to bring them back to Penn State for their continuing education needs.   “Our alumni expect that when they receive an education through Penn State it will be packaged in a special way for them. They want their past affiliation to mean something for them. Whether that comes in the form of a personalized greeting or another way of acknowledging that they are already Penn Staters, they want to be recognized when they make a contact. Our challenge is to make 400,000 people feel special.”   Enhanced collaborations with outreach delivery units like Management Development Programs and Services, Alumni Education, the World Campus, and Cooperative Extension figure prominently into her vision for balancing scale and customization in alumni programming. Already Management Development has provided leadership training at a distance for hundreds of alumni volunteers.   “Cooperative Extension programs are another wonderful example of alumni education in process,” Ryan added. “With more than 70,000 of our alumni association members living in Pennsylvania, the people participating in Cooperative Extension programs are undoubtedly Penn State alumni and friends. We need to take a new look at those groups to see how we can better meet their needs as alumni as well as Pennsylvanians.”   Ryan increasingly sees technology as the means to deliver these services both internally and externally.   “Our main task with Outreach and Cooperative Extension is to build integrated systems so that we can know when we are working with alumni,” she explained. “For example, when someone submits a request for World Campus information or enrolls in a course through Continuing Education or Distance Education, we should know if that person is already a Penn Stater. The support structure should be automatic.”   If the University cannot provide such support, Ryan noted, alumni will find it elsewhere. She cited service examples from airlines and mail-order catalog companies who automatically record user preferences and client histories to demonstrate benchmarks for alumni expectations.   “With the availability of services like that, the expectations of our alumni are on the rise. We need to meet those expectations,” Ryan said.   “When our alumni contact us, we are all Penn State in their eyes. They assume we all know each other and share information instantaneously,” she added. “Our institutions need to be less compartmentalized, and technology can help make that happen.”   As for program delivery, Ryan believes technology will be crucial there as well. Alumni need up-to-date career services and lifelong education opportunities, Ryan remarked, and they cannot always return to their alma mater to take advantage of these services.   The recent growth of on-line networking and other services has already increased alumni contacts within the University. These Web-based services are provided both by the Alumni Association and by individual college and campus societies and Affiliate Program Groups (APGs) centered on a particular academic interest. With subjects ranging from Horticulture to Finance and Electrical Engineering to Nursing, affiliate groups often create a direct connection between departments and their alumni.   The Labor Studies and Industrial Relations APG, for example, offers mentoring and internship advice for current students through its alumni hotline. Other results of such close ties have included endowed scholarships, an annual alumni distinguished lecturer appointment, career development and professional development opportunities for students and alumni, and improved classroom teaching by alumni consultants.   According to Ryan, such interactions reaffirm the commitment alumni have to the institution, to their department and to the subject matter. “When official Alumni Fellows and informal alumni visitors return to Penn State to spend time teaching in the classroom, it is always a moving experience for the alumni, the faculty and the students they meet,” she added.   Nonetheless, Ryan recognizes the broad scope of the needs alumni will bring in the future and stresses the importance of thinking about impact in programming. Optimistic that faculty and delivery units can meet this challenge, Ryan believes “the future is terrific for Penn State.”   “There are huge opportunities to reach our alumni with enrichment education,” she said. “As the large baby boom generation ages, they are retiring young and now want to explore life and take courses. They enjoy the opportunity to do the kind of things that they have never done before. Penn State should be a part of the retirement plan for the engineer who wants to study Chinese painting, the retired teacher who wants to embark on an archeological excavation, and everyone in between. We have the wonderful challenge of reaching out to this group and bringing back their nostalgia through technology, through travel, and through unprecedented access to the most innovative developments in all of the University’s fields. Our efforts must show how Penn State can fit into their future plans.”   Whether she is considering baby boom alumni who want to reinvent themselves, alumni professionals who require continuing professional education, young alumni with career development needs, or any alumni who want to reconnect with the University, Ryan is committed to providing alumni association services to meet those needs: “Whatever our alumni’s goals might be, Penn State needs to be there in their lives to help them succeed.”   The Penn State Alumni Association Web site is located at: http://www.alumni.psu.edu/.
Alumni Education receives Five Star Award
	This summer, the Penn State Alumni Association was awarded a Seal of Excellence for the Model Alumni Education Program from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education (CASE) Commission on Alumni Relations. Judges found Penn State’s Alumni Education program and offerings served as the best comprehensive model for promoting alumni learning and incorporating the CASE core curriculum.   According to Roberta M. Moore, director of Alumni Education at Penn State, attempting to meet the needs of 400,000 alumni across the country is “challenging and exciting.” “Because our alumni represent nearly every stage of life, it demands a flexible and well-placed unit to provide a diversity of educational programming,” she added. “Penn State Alumni Education stands out from programs at other institutions because we represent and are sponsored by both the Penn State Alumni Association and Outreach and Cooperative Extension. This institutional positioning allows us to access both organizations’ professionals and to have the greatest impact on our constituencies.”   Program representatives received the award at the 2000 CASE Assembly International held in Toronto this July. The program will also be featured in the fall issue of CURRENTS, CASE’s monthly publication.
© 2002 Outreach Communications,   Outreach & Cooperative Extension,   The Pennsylvania State University phone: (814) 865-8108,   fax: (814) 863-2765,   e-mail: outreachnews@outreach.psu.edu