I graduated again this year. Third degree, fifth master, 43 years old. I'd assumed I was past the point of being surprised by a ceremony. I wasn't.
I spent years running commercial functions inside education businesses, performance management director, marketing operations at group level, head of commercial at a UK institution. I thought I understood what graduation day meant. I was wrong about that, in a specific and useful way, until I went through it myself again recently.
Graduation day is its own commercial operation
In the UK, the infrastructure around it is real and intentional. This year there was a dedicated portal, a professional flowers service, photography at £20 per print, additional gown time sold by the slot, preferred hotel rates for families travelling in. None of that is accidental. It works because the customer on that day has crossed from price-sensitive to memory-driven. The decision frame is entirely different from any other touchpoint in the student journey.
The CIM, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, had a visible presence at my ceremony. Not accidentally. Graduation day concentrates people who'll spend the next decade talking about the institution. Smart universities treat that as a commercial opportunity, a content moment, and an alumni activation point. The ones that treat it as logistics are leaving real value on the table.
In Italy and Switzerland, when I graduated in my 20s, this orchestrated economy around the day didn't really exist, or at least wasn't visible to me. My experience there is dated, and I was at public universities, so it's not a clean comparison. But if the gap is still broadly true, it's worth naming: one of the few touchpoints where a customer is emotionally invested and not negotiating on price, treated as a formality.
Commercial incentives are structured against retention
The more consistent issue is what happens between enrolment and graduation. Most commercial functions in education are measured on acquisition: number of enrolments, applications, starts. The incentive structure doesn't reward keeping a student engaged, improving their satisfaction, or extending their relationship with the institution. So those things tend not to happen systematically.
Once a student enrols, they largely stop existing as "the business" from a commercial perspective. The attention and budget move to the next intake. The work of deepening that existing relationship, making the student more successful, or building the alumni loop that feeds future cohorts, sits in a gap between departments that nobody owns cleanly.
Most commercial leaders in education would learn more from 2 days as a student than from another quarter of NPS data.
My Swiss university ran this differently, particularly after graduation. They tracked employment outcomes for years. They still treat me as an active alumna. The logic is straightforward: alumni who land well come back to speak, refer new students, and become proof points for the next cohort. That loop only works if the institution measures what happens to graduates well enough to run it. A lot of them don't.
A question worth sitting with
When did you last have someone from your commercial or marketing team go through the full student journey themselves, application, enrolment, progress, graduation, rather than reviewing it from a dashboard?
The touchpoints you've never personally experienced are usually the ones where the biggest gaps sit.
Originally published on LinkedIn. Join the conversation there.