Importer: Updating Graduating Students to Alumni

When handling the transition from Student to Alumni, a lot can vary based on your institution's procedures for handling student access and data updates.  Refer to the Miro board below for an easy-to-follow guide, as well as further details on the most common workflows used by other institutions.

Handling Graduated Students That Retain Their Institution Email

1) Update their data through a student sync by Importing Student Data.  The relevant fields you'll be updating are:

• institution_year_name changed to Alumni
• primary_education:end_date should be updated to the correct graduation date, if it’s not     already.
• primary_education:currently_attending should be set to FALSE (unless they are returning for a graduate degree/additional education at your institution)
  
  Note: This student should drop from your sync over time, since they will have no further information to update.
  • This will not disable their account.

2)  If the student returns later, they can return to the sync with their new information (level of study, courses, education dates, etc.):

• If an alumni returns, their new primary_education:end_date and start_date must be provided in your upload file or manually updated on their profile.  Otherwise, this will error during future uploads.
  • This import error typically shows as {"primary_education.end_date":["must be a date on or after primary_education:start_date"]}} 
  • If you are providing an updated start_date in your import, but not end_date, you should pass **CLEAR** in the end_date field to wipe out the old date and prevent errors. Leaving the end_date field blank in imports will not clear the old end_date value.
    
    
• If they were disabled previously, you will need to either:
  • Manually unarchive the user from their student profile OR
  • Manually upload a file, including the disabled field and set it to FALSE
  • For automatic syncs: Add the disabled field to your upload and set it to FALSE

NOTE: This is a student upload, and thus all standard required fields for any student upload file must be present in order for your file to process successfully. These fields can be found here for your reference. The listed fields above are in addition to the standard required fields for student uploads.

Handling Graduated Students That DO NOT Retain Their Institution Email

1.) Update their data through a student sync by Importing Student Data. The relevant fields you'll be updating are:

• institution_year_name to change to Alumni
• primary_education:end_date should be updated to the correct graduation date, if it’s not     already.
• email_address:
  • You cannot update a student email to an address that is associated with another institution, as those institutions would create separate accounts for these users.
  • You can change these email addresses to personal accounts, such as @gmail, etc.
  • If they keep their institution email from your institution active for an extended period (1 year+), you will not need to change this address yet.
  • If they do not keep their institution email after graduation, you will need to gather their preferred alternate email to continue using Handshake. 
    • We recommend sending a targeted email out requesting their alternate email.
      • If you need the information before a certain date, you may choose to use the verbiage "we will archive your Handshake account on [insert date] if you do not respond with an alternate email" or something similar. 
• primary_education:currently_attending should be set to FALSE (unless they are returning for a graduate degree/additional education at your institution)

NOTE: This is a student upload, and thus all standard required fields for any student upload file must be present in order for your file to process successfully. These fields can be found in Importing Student Data. The listed fields above are in addition to the standard required fields for student uploads.

Disabling Graduated Students (Not Recommended)

If you wish to disable Alumni Handshake accounts after X number of months you can include the disabled column in your student sync, and set this to TRUE for anyone no longer needing access. Refer to Importer: Bulk Archiving Students for detailed information on bulk-archiving users.

*This is not recommended unless user-requested or required. The reason for this is, if an alumni needs access to their profile or CV down the road or wants to continue their job search, we want them to be able to access Handshake as they have been. That being said, if they reach out to us and ask us to inactivate their profile, we will certainly do so.

*If the student returns at a later point, you can just do the opposite of the above to unarchive/re-enable the user: Include the disabled column in your sync and set this to FALSE.

Alternative Option - Manual Import to Update Alumni Information

*If you do not use automatic syncs to manage students, or Alumni are removed from your sync right after graduation, you can use the following steps to manually import an Alumni Update file.

Generate a new CSV file containing these users and the include following fields:

• • username - Current Handshake Username
  • email_address - Existing Handshake E-mail, or new email if updating
  • institution_year_name - Set to Alumni
  • primary_education:end_date - Set to recent graduation date if not already updated
  • disabled - (optional) Include if you need to archive Alumni.  See Disabling Graduated Students above for details.

NOTE: This is a student upload, and thus all standard required fields for any student upload file must be present in order for your file to process successfully. These fields can be found here for your reference. The listed fields above are in addition to the standard required fields for student uploads.

SSO Access for Alumni

Alumni can continue to use SSO if the following are true:

• The student’s account in Handshake is not disabled/archived after graduation.
• You continue to allow access to SSO at the institution for this user (SSO access is managed by your institution locally).  Please check with your IT team if you are unsure about this.

* If Alumni do lose access to SSO, we recommend sending out an email to let students know that they'll need to set a new Handshake-specific password to access the system.  Alumni can always login with email_address and Handshake password if they lose SSO access.

What About Students That Go On to Other Institutions After Graduation?

Many students may go on to other institutions for Graduate programs. In this case, those institutions will create a new, separate account for the student with their new institution-issued email.  You should still maintain their local account with your institution, and update their Alumni status and other information based on the steps above.

For more information on how an existing Alumni connects to your institution, refer to How Students & Alumni Can Request to Access Handshake.