Understanding why people visit college after graduation

When people go back to visit their alma mater, they may trigger an array of emotions including excitement, happiness, nostalgia, and even sadness. 

Bing Pan, professor of recreation, park, and tourism management at Penn State, led a team of researchers who interviewed alumni who returned to Penn State. The researchers found that college often plays a specific role in personal development, creating a lifelong emotional bond in alumni.

College represents a period of identify formation which makes it very important to many people, according to the researchers. They used a model that suggested that many people identify with three homes throughout their life: a “home of origin” where one grew up, a “home of procreation,” where one settled down and builds their own life, and—in between—a “home of exploration” where they went to college.

Results published in Annals of Tourism Research Empirical Insights reinforced the idea that college is a unique home in people’s lives. Conceptually, the home of exploration is where a person has a lot of freedom without the strict rules of being a supervised child or the responsibilities of being an independent adult.  

This freedom to explore allows people to establish their identity through trial and error. People create a strong bond with their college because college is seen as having helped to form their identity.   

“Visiting one’s alma mater is not just about remembering the past; it is also about reconnecting with who you were during college and finding yourself again,” Pan said.  
 
This research was conducted as a graduate-level class project in collaboration with The Happy Valley Adventure Bureau.  

Read the full research article. 

Originally published in March 2024