Expanded Alumni Data for a Changing Higher Education Landscape

For colleges and universities, the need for robust alumni outcomes data has never been more urgent.

Students and families are placing greater scrutiny on return on investment. Institutional leaders are looking for stronger evidence to guide program review and strategic planning. New federal policies—including the Department of Education's new earnings accountability framework, Workforce Pell, and broader legislative efforts focused on workforce development and educational value—are all reinforcing the same trend: higher education is increasingly being asked to demonstrate student success through measurable career outcomes.

This shift is impacting nearly every office on campus:

• Institutional research teams need reliable, longitudinal data to support reporting, accreditation, and strategic planning.

• Academic leaders want better information to guide curriculum and program review. 

• Marketing and enrollment teams need stronger evidence of ROI to support recruitment efforts. 

• Career services offices want to help students explore real career possibilities backed by evidence.

• Executive leaders need trustworthy alumni data to inform strategic decisions and communicate institutional value.

In light of this, institutions need outcomes data that's comprehensive, reliable, and actionable. That's exactly what Alumni Pathways is built to deliver.

Innovation to meet the moment

By connecting your alumni records with Lightcast's workforce intelligence and education records from the National Student Clearinghouse®, Alumni Pathways helps you understand where your graduates work, what additional education they’ve pursued, and how their careers progress over time.

Today, we're excited to share two major enhancements that make Alumni Pathways even more valuable: Global Profiles, which extends alumni visibility beyond the United States, and the Alumni Pathways API, which gives institutions unprecedented flexibility in how they access and use alumni outcomes data.

New: Track alumni careers around the world with Global Profiles

Historically, international visibility has been a challenge for institutions seeking comprehensive alumni career outcomes intelligence.

Many institutions educate international students who return home after graduation, or domestic students whose careers eventually take them abroad. Until now, those career journeys have often disappeared from view, making it difficult to fully understand institutional impact or tell the complete story of alumni success.

With the addition of Global Profiles, Alumni Pathways extends career outcomes beyond U.S. borders.

Powered by Lightcast’s global data coverage, institutions can now track alumni career pathways across more than 165 countries, giving them a more comprehensive understanding of where graduates live, work, and build their careers. International job titles and skills are automatically translated and normalized with Lightcast's proprietary taxonomies, making it easy to analyze global career data alongside domestic outcomes. Global profiles are also seamlessly integrated into existing Alumni Pathways reports, with simple filters for viewing domestic, international, or combined alumni populations.

For institutions, that opens up several exciting opportunities. Global Profiles can help you:

• Track the career outcomes of students who move abroad after graduation.

• Demonstrate your institution's worldwide impact and reach.

• Show prospective students that graduates succeed in the countries where they hope to build their careers.

New: Bring Alumni Pathways data into your own systems with the Alumni Pathways API

Quality data becomes even more valuable when it's easy to use. That's why we're also excited to introduce the new Alumni Pathways API.

Rather than relying solely on PDFs or spreadsheets, institutions can now integrate Alumni Pathways data directly into their own systems, allowing alumni outcomes to become part of existing reporting, analytics, and even student-facing experiences.

The API gives institutions maximum flexibility to access, combine, and display alumni outcomes data wherever it's most useful. That means you can:

• Integrate Alumni Pathways data into institutional data warehouses and business intelligence platforms.

• Power executive dashboards with automatically updated career outcomes.

• Embed alumni outcomes directly onto academic program pages and institutional websites.

For institutional research teams, this means less time managing exports and more time generating insights. For marketing and enrollment teams, it means automatically embedding current alumni outcomes, in fully branded displays, wherever prospective students are exploring programs. For leadership teams, it means having trusted career outcomes data available inside the systems they already use every day.

Innovation driven by the needs of higher education

These updates aren't standalone feature releases. They reflect a broader commitment to helping institutions get more value from alumni outcomes data as higher education continues to evolve.

As expectations around accountability, workforce alignment, and return on investment continue to grow, colleges and universities need alumni data that is not only reliable, but also actionable. 

That’s what Alumni Pathways delivers. Whether you’re supporting strategic planning, demonstrating institutional value, or helping students explore career possibilities, we’re pleased to offer the insight you need for confident, data-driven decisions.

Ready to see it in action? Schedule a personalized walkthrough with our team to explore how Alumni Pathways can help your institution put alumni success data to work.