You will be sharing stories about your graduating students every year. When you publish a Graduation Achievement the students included on it will become "inactive" shortly afterward.
These students will still have Merit pages, and can log in and make any changes they would like to their page. This "inactive" tag will only affect how they appear inside your Merit account.
You will still be able to locate them through a search on the Students section, but they will essentially move to the background in some of the other parts of your account. This mostly affects three parts of your account:
- Mentions and Merit AI - Students who have graduated will be excluded from your media monitoring and Merit AI results.
- Dashboard stats - The student statistics that appear on your Merit dashboard will only factor in students who have not yet earned the graduated tag from your institution.
- Adding students to a Newsroom press release manually - When you create a Newsroom, you will not be able to search for a student who has graduated using the search feature. However, these graduated students can be added to any achievement through a spreadsheet or manual search
Note: If a graduated student is included in one of your imports or achievements, they will not be automatically reactivated. Please contact the Merit team if you need to remove the graduated tag from a student.
Associate Degrees
If you're a four-year institution and regularly see students graduating with associate degrees and then also completing their bachelor's degrees at your school, you may want to break your graduation achievement up into two separate stories: one for bachelor's degree students and another for those earning associate degrees.
We then suggest using the Milestone category for the associate degree version of your story. This will ensure that these students remain in the foreground inside your Merit account.