Alumni College Advice Newsletter for Current Students

High school juniors and seniors navigating the college process often benefit most from the perspective of people who recently went through it and can speak candidly about what they learned. Alumni who are two to five years out of high school are uniquely positioned to offer this. Your newsletter is how you connect them to current students.

Recruit recent alumni first

For college advice specifically, recent graduates are the most valuable voices. Alumni who graduated five years ago can speak to the first-year experience and early college life with fresh memory. Alumni who graduated ten or twenty years ago often have outdated information about the application landscape. Target your recruiting to graduates from the last three to six years.

Describe the format and time commitment

Whether you are organizing a panel, a question-and-answer session, or a series of individual conversations, tell alumni exactly what they are committing to. A two-hour Thursday evening panel. Four fifteen-minute one-on-one conversations scheduled across one week. Specific commitments produce specific responses. Open-ended asks do not.

Name the questions students are asking

Give alumni a preview of what current students want to know. How did you decide between the schools you got into? How did you write the personal essay? What do you wish you had known about the first semester? What surprised you most about college? These questions help alumni arrive prepared rather than improvising. They also signal to alumni that the conversation will be substantive.

Tell current students what to expect from alumni advisors

Send a companion newsletter to juniors and seniors introducing the program and telling them how to participate. What alumni will be available. What to prepare before the conversation. That alumni are sharing experience, not giving guarantees. Students who come prepared with specific questions get more out of the conversation than those who arrive hoping the alumnus will do the work.

Share what alumni and students said about previous sessions

A senior who writes "I talked to an alumnus who is at the exact school I am applying to and she told me the one thing the essay prompt is actually looking for" communicates the value of the program to next year's cohort. Collect one or two quotes after each session and use them in the following year's recruitment newsletter.