Attended but did not Graduate; Delete or Inactivate?

We use the constituency code "Former Student", and uncheck "Primary Alumni Information". We don't mail or solicit them, unless their name comes up to be invited to a reunion. If they respond to something sent for the reunion, we'll add the code "Alumni", mark their education as primary, and mark their education status as "Did Not Graduate". We're K-12, not a college, but we generally have 2-3 people added each year this way, when they are still in touch with their classmates, or reach out. It's usually people who were here for a few years, and, for whatever reason, didn't attend their senior year. I imagine it'd be different for someone who attended for just a semester, or even just took one course, but if you add them as students, it's good practice to never delete them, because you never know who's name may come up.

Only Beloit College education records are marked as Primary. Possible Education statuses are Graduate, Non-Graduate, Current Student, and a few others.



If they attended for more than 1 semester, they are Alumni. All others are Former Students or Former Exchange Students (recorded in Constituency Codes). There are a variety of exceptions. No Alumni is ever flagged as "Inactive". 



We rarely delete Constituent records.



 

We are also a K-12 school and use Former Student and uncheck Primary Education. We also see these Former Students reconnect at reunion times and we've also had more than you'd think enroll their own children some years down the line.

We mark them all as Alumnus, both in the Alumni information and in the Attributes. And, once an alumnus, never deleted, because we like to include them in our Alumni Directory and invite them to our Alumni Reunions, even if they do not donate. For you, I suppose if your Registrar's office has a separate database and handles such mailings independently of your fundriaising office, it might be sensible to delete them, but I would advise not to.



As far as non-graduates, we delineate these by using Alumni fields: Graduates get a date entered into the "Graduated" date field, and under Status, we put "Graduate". As a seminary college, we have more non-graduates than graduates because we want our students to discern whether they are really cut out for the priesthood or not. If you were a highschool, I imagine the inverse would be true.

oh, so I pushed the send button without the last sentence.  Which is  once they have a code, they are just excluded from any mail lists or invites unless you want to include.  I have worked at one school where we had a lot of folks that never graduated, for whatever reason, that ended up being regular donors at some point, or left us in their estate plan.    If the records had been deleted we would have no idea why they left us in their will. :-)

We have three designations.  Everyone gets an "Alumni" code if they finished at least one semester.  They also get another code called "Alumni - Undergraduate Degree" or "Alumni - No Undergraduate Degree" depending on whether they graduate or not.  We have a third code called "Student No Credit" who we assign to students who attended but did not finish one semester.  They are also marked "Inactive".  If a student registered but withdrew before starting class, then the record is deleted.