The University should consider extending benefits to Stanford graduates in an attempt to increase alumni participation. This can be easily and effectively accomplished by granting recent Stanford graduates continued access to online resources.

One suggestion is to allow Stanford students to keep their email address @stanford.edu. Students could opt to pay a small administrative fee to retain access to their current email addresses.

Currently, Stanford graduates have the option to maintain an account @stanfordalumni.org. However, this lacks the punch of a legitimate Stanford address. Moreover, many of us have grown fond of (or will eventually grow fond of) our Stanford email addresses and would prefer to keep them long after we graduate.

Having a Stanford email address would be useful for those who want to continue scholarly research after graduation. It would also reduce the hassle of forwarding our email to new addresses. If nothing else, it would guarantee continued access to our Facebook accounts.

Another suggestion is to grant Stanford alumni members limited access to online resources. This would again be an opt-in system, with students paying a fee to access JSTOR, LexisNexis and selected online journals.

Alumni members could continue to gain access to valuable resources that they would not have without paying exorbitant fees. It would be nice, for example, to have access to the Oxford English Dictionary online; at an annual subscription rate of $295 per year, the cost of maintaining an individual subscription is indulgently prohibitive.

On the other hand, the University could help bundle costs together and capitalize on its existing arrangements with information vendors. This approach would lead to a win-win situation for both alumni members and vendors. First, it would lead to significant savings for individual users, who would not otherwise subscribe to these services. Second, it would result in an expanded customer base and increased revenue for vendors.

Not all alumni members would find this arrangement attractive or even necessary. Those who remain in academia will continue to have access to online journals and databases anyway; others who need such resources for work can have their companies pay for them. But for those others without such resources at their disposal, such an arrangement would be invaluable.

We are not suggesting that the University provide these services for free, or even at a subsidized rate. Alumni members who wish to enjoy such services should be required to pay an annual subscription fee. The cost of offering these services should not be borne by current undergraduates or graduate students, who already have to deal with skyrocketing tuition and living expenses. It would cost the University some amount of money to maintain these services, but we suspect that there may well be sufficient interest in these services to justify any additional costs incurred by the administration.

Nor are we suggesting that the University offer complete access to all its online resources. Rather, it can offer a multi-tiered fee structure, much like a cable television company. Alumni members could keep their email addresses and select five of their favorite online databases and journals for a flat fee.

Nevertheless, it would be disingenuous for the University to gouge alumni members keen on maintaining strong ties with their alma mater. As such, the University should earn only modest profits required to support these programs.

In any case, the University stands to profit enormously from such arrangements. Programs like these would generate immense goodwill on the part of Stanford graduates and possibly lead to increased alumni donations. Thus, the University should seriously consider implementing such programs to reap the benefits of increased alumni participation.