Nerd Nation is a quarter-million strong.
That’s right. For the first time in history, there are more than 250,000 living Stanford alumni. There were, in fact, 251,748 in July. Our number inevitably dwindles a bit before growing at the end of each quarter, but that’s the count we’ve used to paint a portrait of the alumni body.
In our story package, you’ll meet Steven Miller, who was slated, as of June 1, to become the 250,000th alumnus at Commencement on June 14. He completed a PhD in chemistry, which was one of Stanford’s founding departments when it was established in 1891. You’ll also dive into charts and statistics that show you what we studied then and now (econ is a perennial undergraduate favorite), where we live, and, to some extent, who we married.
You’ll notice some puzzlements. How, for example, did Stanford grant 144 doctoral degrees in 1891 when it didn’t open its doors until October of that year? In fact, those were graduates of Cooper Medical College, retroactively counted as alumni after Stanford adopted the San Francisco medical school in 1908.
Another technical point: Under the definition adopted several decades ago by the Board of Trustees, an alum is anyone who spent three or more quarters in a degree-granting program. In simpler terms: Finish your first year? You’re one of us.
We went deep into the data, and it revealed stories—some of which we could explain and others we could not.
As you can probably discern, we went deep into the data, and it revealed stories—some of which we could explain and others we could not. It’s pretty evident why Stanford enrollment dips during world wars and rises after the first G.I. Bill, for instance. It’s less clear why undergraduate majors undergo major turnover at certain moments, but whenever the lines on our source graph started to look like spaghetti, we knew it was time to designate another era.
Speaking of eras, we’ve just moved from one to another here at the Stanford Alumni Association, as Howard Wolf, ’80, retired after 25 years as vice president for alumni affairs and president of SAA, handing the reins to Michelle Landrey Cline, ’93, MBA ’98. You’ll read about them, too, in the story package; I’ll just note here, for the record, that Michelle’s arrival brings the Class of ’93 to 8.3 percent of this magazine’s masthead.
One of Howard’s last official acts as president was to track down his classmate Amy Walker Slankard, ’80, and her brother, Scott Walker, ’78, so we could identify them in our 1,000 Words photo of frosh move-in 1976. It’s an example of how human connection and community carry on long after our student days—another type of portrait of the alumni body.
Kathy Zonana, ’93, JD ’96, is the editor of Stanford. Email her at kathyz@stanford.edu.
