Email deliverability for education institutions
Where the addresses come from
- Student information systems, holding a campus address that exists only while the person is enrolled.
- Applicant and inquiry records, captured with a personal address before any campus one exists.
- Alumni databases, often holding the campus address that was shut off at graduation.
- Staff and faculty directories, with ordinary business-domain behavior and ordinary turnover.
The address expires on a known date
Most colleges deactivate student addresses some period after graduation. That is a scheduled failure, unlike the erratic decay in every other sector, and it means an alumni list built from campus addresses fails on a timetable somebody could have written down.
Annual appeals reach for exactly that data. The largest send of the year goes to the oldest records in the system, which is the worst possible pairing.
Departments compound it. In a shared platform such as Emma, several teams mail overlapping alumni lists and a suppression created by one applies to all of them.
What the results tend to look like
Campus domains resolve predictably, since a shut off address returns a clean rejection. Personal addresses in alumni records behave like a consumer list. The mix is unusually informative: a high invalid rate among campus addresses simply means the records predate shutoff.
What to do about it
Capture a personal address before graduation
It is the only address that survives shutoff, and the window to ask is while the student is still enrolled and still reading their campus mail.
Check before the annual appeal, not during it
That campaign combines the largest volume of the year with the oldest data in the system.
Agree a shared standard across departments
In a shared platform one department's careless send suppresses contacts every other department depends on.
Flag campus addresses by graduation year
You know the shutoff schedule, so you know which cohorts are already gone without probing anything.
Questions people ask
Why do alumni lists bounce so heavily?
Because they hold campus addresses that the college itself shut off. It is a scheduled failure rather than gradual decay, and the schedule is one you set.
When should an college check?
Before the annual appeal above all. That campaign is the largest send of the year against the oldest records in the database.
Should alumni with only a campus address be removed?
Check them first. Some colleges maintain lifetime forwarding, in which case the address still works. Where it does not, the row is a prompt to find a personal address rather than to delete the person.
Related sectors
See the breakdown on your own list
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled rather than guessed at, and we do not bill them.