The Wall Street Journal-20080216-Encore -A Special Report-- Back to School- College alumni groups are enhancing their travel programs -- and opening the doors to a wider audience

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Encore (A Special Report); Back to School: College alumni groups are enhancing their travel programs -- and opening the doors to a wider audience

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It's always been good advice: If you attend college, you'll go places. That's never been more true than it is today.

Growing numbers of colleges and universities are developing increasingly sophisticated educational tours with older alumni in mind. Next month, for instance, as part of a trip organized by Yale, Stanford and Harvard universities, among others, participants will board a cruise ship in Hong Kong and mingle with former President George H.W. Bush and other high-powered graduates and professors from those schools.

This summer, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology group will travel to Mongolia to catch all two minutes and nine seconds of a solar eclipse. And in October, MIT and Princeton University will take space buffs to Kazakhstan to watch the launching of a manned Soyuz space capsule -- and then to mission control in Moscow, where the tour group will observe the craft's docking at the International Space Station.

Colleges, of course, have long sponsored educational trips for alumni. Today's offerings, though, go beyond trusty museum tours and classrooms. Schools are putting their distinguished faculty in the spotlight as trip leaders and guest lecturers and working their alumni connections across the globe to become bigger players in the educational travel business.

"It's more than just travel and sightseeing," says Ron VandenBerghe, an accountant from Danville, Calif., recalling a Stanford-sponsored trip to Berlin where travelers met privately with the U.S. ambassador to Germany, William Timken, a Stanford alumnus. "Stanford opens many doors," Mr. VandenBerghe says.

Alumni programs also are catering to a wider audience; you don't necessarily have to be a graduate of a particular school to travel with it. (You may, however, be required to join the alumni association or pay a per-trip surcharge, a nominal fee relative to the overall cost.)

Mr. VandenBerghe, for instance, is a proud graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. That hasn't stopped him, though, from participating in Stanford's Travel/Study programs. In recent years, he's made 12 trips with Stanford, including one last September and October to Croatia featuring former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Secretary of Defense William Perry (a Stanford graduate).

Of course, rubbing elbows with former cabinet secretaries or trekking to Asia to catch an eclipse isn't for the financially faint- of-heart. As alumni trips have grown more exotic, they've also become more expensive. The China cruise next month starts at about $16,000 a person; the trip to watch the Soyuz launching starts at about $20,000. And even the best group tours are still just that -- group tours, traditionally a turn-off for the baby boomers alumni programs covet.

That said, colleges are finding that more and more graduates, and baby boomers in particular, want a "value-added component" in their trips and vacations, says Elizabeth Player Jones, associate director of Stanford's Travel/Study programs. To that end, alumni tours, she adds, typically offer "opportunities and experiences you wouldn't get on your own." Stanford, for instance, was one of the first alumni groups to take visitors to Libya when travel to that country opened up, and to Cuba during the brief period when travel from the U.S. to the island was allowed. Someday soon, Ms. Player Jones says, the university hopes to be able to add Iran to the list.

Jackie Olson, director of Berkeley's Cal Discoveries Travel affiliate, runs one of the largest alumni travel programs in the country. She says the average age of the program's participants has dropped significantly, to between 60 and 65 from about 75 just two years ago. People in this leading edge of the baby-boom generation -- and boomers in general -- want more in the way of educational travel and adventure, she adds. Berkeley's 48-page catalog lists 68 trips for this year alone.

Cal graduate Bob Reyes, a 61-year-old city planner in the Boston area, for years preferred more-conventional travel: renting villas in Italy and the south of France with friends. It took some convincing by his 54-year-old partner, an avid gardener, to get him to sign up for Berkeley's eight-person expedition to Borneo last summer. With a Berkeley-affiliated botanist leading the way, the group hiked all over the island, including up a mountain, along beaches, and through jungles and rainforests, stopping along the way to study exotic insects, plants and wildlife.

"It was an amazing feeling to encounter nature on its own terms," says Mr. Reyes, who adds that he would "do it again in a heartbeat."

The design of alumni trips varies from one college to the next. In some instances, a school will simply sign up for a private travel company's prepackaged trips; in other cases, an alumni group will work with tour operators and transportation providers to customize its offerings -- developing the educational component, planning itineraries, making travel arrangements and handling logistics. Some colleges like to travel alone; others team up with other universities, or with nonprofit cultural and environmental organizations (the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution and the World Wildlife Federation, to name just a few).

These different approaches to developing a trip mean that would-be participants should do some homework before signing up. J. Mara DelliPriscoli, president of Travel Learning Connections Inc., a consulting firm in Ronan, Mont., says first ask what makes a trip "educational": Find out about the lecturers -- who they are and how much interaction you can expect to have with them -- and learn what will be expected of you, including reading and preparation required ahead of time and assignments while traveling (keeping a journal, for instance). She also advises checking whether there will be opportunities for unadvertised, behind-the-scenes meetings at your destinations. Schools often don't publicize these because they can't guarantee them, but they usually know about the possibilities beforehand, Ms. DelliPriscoli says.

Ms. Olson at Cal Discoveries also recommends asking the alumni travel office about the private travel companies they partner with. Have they worked in the past with the company that's handling the trip you're interested in? If so, for how long? Can they tell you what other schools have used the same provider, and maybe give you contact information for those schools' alumni offices, so you can check with them for feedback? Further, says Ms. DelliPriscoli in Montana, ask what kind of training they have to handle medical issues and accidents, as well as what kinds of measures they have in place to deal with crises like disease outbreaks, natural disasters and global terrorism.

Some alumni might balk at the fact that schools are opening their trips to non-alumni. Ms. Player Jones at Stanford says some participants may be "disappointed" that there aren't more alumni travelers on any given trip, but that doesn't seem to deter them. (She says the mix is typically about 60/40 alumni/non-alumni.) Non-alumni are drawn by the educational aspect of the trips and by the lecturers, she says, "and are like-minded travelers because of this. So it works well."

For the most part, travelers won't have to worry about being hit up for donations to a school on the trip itself. Ms. Player Jones says Stanford, like many universities, doesn't solicit on its trips. She does acknowledge, however, that a positive travel experience can build goodwill between alumni and their respective alma maters -- goodwill that, in turn, may translate into money for the schools in the form of increased donations down the road.

Some of the most popular alumni trips today are also among the most extravagant. Numerous schools, including the University of Notre Dame in Indiana and Washington and Lee University in Virginia, offer trips around the world by private jet. Despite their price tags (as much as $50,000 per person), the tours tend to sell out quickly.

"It was the trip of a lifetime," says Trudy Salter, who, along with her husband, Charles, president of a San Francisco-based engineering firm and a Cal Berkeley graduate, went on one last year. Stops on the 10-country tour included Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, the Taj Mahal in India, and the Sphinx in Egypt. The lecturers "made it an amazing experience," Mrs. Salter says. "Because we had traveled in the past, we knew how much we were getting for the money."

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Ms. Winokur is a writer in California. She can be reached at [email protected].