Alumni Consulting Initiative
Why an Alumni Consulting Initiative?
Based on a discussion that was kicked off in the General Assembly of the Alumni Association in 2013, a group of alumni with consulting background got together to offer consulting support to Jacobs University.
This was against a backdrop that on the one hand, Jacobs University faces a challenging (financial) situation, and on the other, the alumni community comprises many alumni with valuable skills and experience who strongly identify with the university.
With the ACI, Jacobs University can gain access to relevant business and consulting expertise free of charge, without need for justification vis-à-vis its (political) stakeholders.
First Results
Two projects were initiated under the leadership of Axel Domeyer ’06, Jan-Dirk Früchtenicht ’05, and Henrik Maedler ’07:
Student Marketing looked at conducting a more targeted outreach to attractive prospective students. With the support of Manuel Adolphsen ’06 and Frederik Bösch ’05, the team derived recommendations on student marketing focus countries (and high schools) based on analysis of historical student data and national education markets.
The ACI further proposed the setup of an ‘Alumni Recruiting Network’, i.e. a database of alumni willing to support student marketing and a related process landscape. After all, alumni are Jacobs University’s best ambassadors, and recommendations trump all other marketing channels. – You are now kindly invited to sign up to the Network by e-mailing Director of Admissions Heiko Walkenhorst at h.walkenhorst@jacobs-university.de
Further details on planned elements of support below:
Tuition Financing investigated possible approaches to increase repayment of tuition postponements and looked into alternative tuition financing models. Under the workstream leadership of Alexander Stimpfle ’10 and with the support of Shinta Harsana ’10, Mitul Jain ’09, and Anna-Lena Schindl ’12, the team investigated how to best reduce the default rate of existing loans and reduce risk exposure for future loans, developed a comprehensive ‘student loan journey’ concept, launched a communications campaign with Homecoming 2014 and set up an International Financing Database, the future knowledge pool for tuition financing from sources outside of Jacobs University.
Next Steps
With many of you, we were able to conduct two successful engagements around Student Marketing and Tuition Financing as part of the ‘Alumni Consulting Initiative’ last year.
Having established ourselves as somewhat of a ‘trusted adviser’ to the university leadership through our work, we’ve been asked to be involved in a number of (further) initiatives:
- Financial Literacy Workshop – this was suggested by the Tuition Financing project and concerns the development of (mandatory) financial literacy workshops for all three years of Jacobs undergrad. First steps are the structuring of all workshops as well as development of the first year edition for the fall semester this year together with the university. Next is actually teaching/facilitating the first workshop in Bremen.
- Pricing – the university leadership is looking for some insights in reviewing the pricing for Jacobs’ offerings. We’re still waiting for a briefing on what this concerns specifically and will be able to scope the topic and tasks then.
- Employability – one of the change teams at the university is looking at the ‘employability’ of Jacobs graduates and wants some help defining relevant KPIs. A scoping discussion will also follow to identify what this project will entail exactly.
Now you come in!
In case you’re interested and up for the challenge, please reply here indicating a topic preference (ranking 1-3 would be best) and your rough availability over the coming couple of months, incl. ability to travel to Bremen.
We hope to be able continue our fruitful work for and with Jacobs and count on your contributions and initiative.
Looking forward to hearing from you!
Contact:
