The study presents data from 1,140 college students from 4-year colleges in the United States concerning their view of the college alumni association.  The 90-page report gives detailed information on the type and percentage of students who have been mentored by alumni vs student peers, graduate students and faculty/staff.  It also gives detailed data on the extent to which undergraduates feel that they have benefited from the college alumni association, and whether or not they wish to join when they graduate.   The report also gives targeted information on the percentage of undergraduates who expect to go to their first class reunion, and just how beneficial they feel a link with the alumni association will be for their future careers.  The report provides college and university departments of alumni services, alumni associations and college advancement professionals a means to benchmark their own internal data vs. a national sample. 

Data in the report is presented in the aggregate and then broken out separately for sixteen different variables including but not limited to: college grades, gender, income level, year of college standing, SAT/ACT scores, regional origin, age, sexual orientation, race & ethnicity, college major and other personal variables, and by Carnegie class, enrollment size and public/private status of the survey participants institutions of higher education.

Just a few of the report’s many findings are that:

• 59% of undergraduates say that they have not had much contact with the college alumni association
• Males were generally much more apt than females to value contact with the alumni association; more than 24% of men but only 17.2% of women found the alumni association useful or very much so. 
• Except for far-right students, the more left wing politically the student the more likely that they had been mentored by faculty or staff.  Also, the better a student’s grades, the more likely they were to seek out faculty or staff mentoring.
• Individuals who grew up in major cities were much more likely alumni association joiners than those raised virtually anywhere else
• Gay students were much more likely than straight ones to have had an alumni mentorship.