I graduated again this year. Third degree, fifth master, 42 years old. I still got emotional in that hall, and it took me by surprise.

I spent years inside education businesses looking at the student journey end to end: performance management director first, then marketing operations at group level, then running commercial functions. I thought I understood graduation day. I didn't, not until I lived it again myself very recently.

Here's what I'd tell any commercial or marketing leader in education, in the UK, in Italy, or anywhere else in Europe.

Graduation day is a business in its own right

The graduation day has its own infrastructure. My last graduation in 2026 in the UK had a dedicated portal, a flowers service, photography (£20 a photo isn't unusual), extra time in the cap and gown for pictures you could buy, preferred hotel deals for family flying in.

At the graduation day, the customer cares more about the memory than the price. That's exactly why flowers, photography, even the extra minutes in the gown, all sell.

The graduation day is also when universities put alumni and partners in front of the room. The CIM, the Chartered Institute of Marketing, had a visible presence at mine, for example, and it was not an accident. Graduation day is full of people who'll talk about the institution for years. Smart universities use that well.

Most universities sell qualifications. The smart ones also sell memories.

Italy and Switzerland do this differently

I graduated twice before, in Italy and in Switzerland, in my 20s. There was no portal, no add-ons economy built around the day, far less content produced around it. My experience there is dated now, so I'll hold it loosely, and I studied in public universities at the time, which isn't quite the same comparison. But if it's still broadly true, it's a gap worth naming. Graduation day is one of the few moments where a customer is emotionally invested and not negotiating on price. Treat it as a formality rather than a content and revenue opportunity, and you leave real value on the table: organic content, paid content, direct revenue.

The touchpoints in between get ignored

Most of what an education business sells happens between enrolment and graduation. That's exactly where a lot of education marketers stop paying attention. Once a student enrols, they stop feeling like "the business," because commercial functions in education are usually paid on acquisition, not lifetime value or retention. The focus goes on getting more students, not on getting students who pay more and stay longer, and the chance to keep engaging them gets missed.

My Swiss university did this differently, especially after graduation. They tracked graduate employment outcomes for years, and they still cultivate me as an alumna today. Partly to help graduates land the roles they actually want, partly because it builds a loop: alumni come back to speak, get involved, build credibility, become proof points for the next cohort. A lot of institutions still don't measure career progression well enough to run that loop at all.

My question for you

When did you last send someone from your team through the full student journey themselves, application to graduation, rather than reviewing it from a dashboard?

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I think most commercial leaders in education would learn more from 2 days as a student than from another quarter of NPS data.