Institution Alumni Search API Guide

Searching for alumni of a specific university by name runs into a problem that is easy to underestimate: the same school gets stored under multiple spellings across different profiles. "NYU" and "New York University" refer to the same institution, but a name-based text filter treats them as two different strings, and a search for one will not surface people who used the other.

A school ID filter sidesteps this entirely, since it matches an institution's stable identifier rather than however a given profile happened to type the name. The tradeoff is that not every profile has been re-indexed with a school ID yet, so ID coverage rolls out gradually as older profiles get refreshed:

The most reliable source for a school ID is a profile you have already enriched: every education entry on a full profile carries the school's ID directly, so a practical workflow is enrich one known alumnus first, read the ID off their record, then use that ID for every subsequent alumni search rather than guessing at how the name is spelled.

If a school has no known alumni yet to pull an ID from, name search remains fully populated across every profile, unlike ID coverage which is still filling in. Falling back to name matching is the correct default for a brand-new query, and switching to ID-based search once the first real alumnus has been identified is the more precise follow-up.