Future alumni giving starts with student-centred teaching and stronger campus experience
Updated May 22, 2026
Alumni giving is usually treated as something universities think about after students have left. This Quality in Higher Education paper suggests the more useful question is what students experience, and say about that experience, while they are still on campus. Aftab Dean and John Graeme McLean's "Creating future alumni donors: exploring critical aspects of an enriched undergraduate experience" matters because it uses English student survey evidence to show which parts of university life are most likely to shape future willingness to donate. For institutions that take student voice seriously, that is a useful reminder: comments about teaching, support, belonging, and career confidence are not just service feedback. They are early signals of whether students feel attached to the institution at all.
Context and research question
In a UK sector dealing with capped tuition fees, rising costs, and sharper pressure on resource allocation, it is tempting to treat alumni fundraising as a problem for advancement teams alone. This paper takes a different view. It asks which parts of the undergraduate experience most influence whether students expect to support their university later, and what that says about quality in higher education more broadly. That makes the study useful well beyond fundraising, because it identifies the parts of the student experience senior teams may want to protect when budgets are tight.
The authors developed a proprietary Student University Experience Survey through focus groups and two pilot studies, then refined it into 42 Likert statements across pedagogical and social themes plus four demographic questions. The survey ran across several English Russell Group and Post-92 universities and initially gathered 963 responses; after incomplete and patterned responses were removed, the final analytical sample was 607 students. The analysis then grouped the responses into the main dimensions of experience associated with future donation intentions, giving the paper a practical lens on what students appear to value most.
Key findings
Student-centred pedagogy emerged as the strongest signal. The paper argues that when students experience teaching as personally engaging, supportive, and clearly designed around their learning, they are more likely to express future willingness to donate. That matters for UK universities because it frames everyday academic practice as part of long-term institutional affinity, not just short-term satisfaction.
"student centred pedagogy significantly influences future donation intentions."
Career confidence and expected future income also mattered. Students who felt more confident about achieving their career aspirations and meeting their income expectations were more likely to report donation intent. In practice, that means employability is not only a graduate outcomes metric. It also shapes whether students feel the university delivered real value.
Positive social experience was part of the story, not a decorative extra. The study highlights the role of valued social experiences, community, and wider campus life in shaping attachment to the institution. For Student Experience teams, that is a useful warning against treating clubs, societies, peer connection, and belonging as secondary to the academic core. They are part of how students decide whether the institution feels worth backing later.
Not every familiar survey theme carried the same weight. In the factor analysis, university resources and course administration items dropped out of the strongest experience groupings. That does not mean logistics and administration are irrelevant. It suggests that once the basics are functioning, universities learn more about long-term affinity from pedagogy, aspirations, skills, and social experience than from routine operational measures alone.
Mission-group differences suggest benchmarking still matters. Post-92 students rated transferable skills, student-centred pedagogy, confidence in career aspirations, and future income slightly higher than Russell Group students. That is a practical reminder that institutions should compare experience patterns by cohort and context rather than assume one universal hierarchy of student priorities.
Practical implications
First, universities should stop treating advancement, quality, and student experience as separate evidence worlds. If teaching quality, career confidence, and social connection shape future institutional attachment, then the comments collected through module evaluations, annual programme surveys, and pulse surveys belong in strategic planning. This becomes much more useful when teams benchmark and triangulate survey evidence rather than relying on one satisfaction score, because it gives leaders a stronger basis for deciding where scarce investment will have the greatest effect.
Second, institutions should collect and analyse feedback on the specific experiences this paper identifies as high value: student-centred teaching, skills development, career confidence, and community. Numeric scores can show movement, but free-text explains why students felt supported, stretched, ignored, or disconnected. A defensible workflow such as our NSS open-text analysis methodology helps teams separate those themes before they collapse into one generic satisfaction story. That gives UK higher education teams a clearer route from student evidence to course, support, and resourcing decisions.
Third, do not dismiss belonging and social experience as soft extras. This paper treats positive social experience as part of the pathway to future support for the institution, which means comments about societies, peer networks, induction, and feeling part of campus are strategically relevant. If universities listen to those signals earlier, they can protect engagement and institutional trust at the same time.
Finally, keep the analytics question honest. This paper measures intention to donate, not later alumni behaviour, and it relies on a bespoke survey rather than NSS. The practical move is therefore not to copy the instrument wholesale, but to test whether similar patterns appear in your own comment data and survey items. Student Voice Analytics fits naturally here because it helps teams compare teaching, support, belonging, and careers themes at scale without losing traceability, which makes cross-team decisions easier to defend.
FAQ
Q: How should a UK university apply this paper if it already runs NSS and local student surveys?
A: Start by mapping existing questions and comments to four broad areas: teaching experience, transferable skills, career confidence, and social belonging. Then review which themes repeat by school, year group, and cohort, using a shared language for coding and interpretation. Our student feedback analysis glossary is useful here because it helps teams stay consistent when they turn open comments into evidence.
Q: What should we be cautious about before generalising the findings?
A: This is an English multi-university study with 607 usable responses and a custom survey instrument. It studies intention to donate rather than actual alumni giving, and factor analysis necessarily simplifies a complicated student journey into a smaller set of themes. UK teams should read it as strong directional evidence about resource priorities, not as a direct forecasting model for future donations.
Q: What does this change about student voice practice more broadly?
A: It broadens what counts as strategically important feedback. Comments about teaching style, social connection, confidence, and career prospects are not peripheral to institutional performance. They help explain whether students see the university as a place worth speaking well of, staying connected to, and supporting later.
References
[Paper Source]: Aftab Dean and John Graeme McLean "Creating future alumni donors: exploring critical aspects of an enriched undergraduate experience" DOI: 10.1080/13538322.2025.2538352
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