ASU Magazine
ASU Magazine was the quarterly alumni magazine of Arizona State University and the ASU Alumni Association, published in Tempe, Arizona, for graduates and supporters of one of the largest public universities in the United States. In its mature form it was distributed to more than 300,000 readers, making it one of the biggest alumni magazine audiences in American higher education. The magazine covered research, teaching, athletics and alumni achievement across a university that had reinvented itself in the twenty-first century as what its president called a New American University. Its successor title, ASU Thrive, carries the same mission forward in print and digital form from Tempe, publishing features and profiles for the Sun Devil alumni community under the volume numbering ASU Magazine established.
A University of Unusual Scale
To understand ASU Magazine, a reader must first grasp the scale of Arizona State University. Founded on 12 March 1885 as the Territorial Normal School at Tempe, a teacher-training school on twenty acres of donated farmland, the institution passed through a long series of names — Tempe Normal School, Tempe State Teachers College, Arizona State Teachers College and Arizona State College — before a statewide vote in 1958 gave it the name Arizona State University. Under President Michael M. Crow, who arrived in 2002, ASU pursued growth and inclusion at the same time, measuring itself, in the language of its charter, not by whom it excludes but by whom it includes and how they succeed. Enrolment passed 160,000 students in the autumn of 2025 across its campuses and online programmes, and the university reported enrolling more than 200,000 students over the course of the 2025–26 year, including the largest online student body in its history. An alumni magazine for such an institution writes for teachers trained in the normal school era and for online graduates who may never have lived in Arizona.
The Magazine and the Alumni Association
ASU Magazine was produced by the communications and marketing department of the ASU Alumni Association, which published the magazine and also produced major alumni events such as the Founders' Day awards dinner. Appearing quarterly, it combined long reported features with university news, sports coverage, reports and photographs from alumni chapters across the country, and a full Class Notes section in which graduates recorded their careers, marriages and family news. The magazine's purpose was retention of a particular kind: to keep hundreds of thousands of graduates, scattered across Arizona, the United States and the world, feeling that the fast-changing university in Tempe remained their university. Because so many ASU alumni are first-generation graduates, working adults or online students, the magazine placed unusual emphasis on stories of access — programmes that paired creative ambitions with business training, partnerships that helped employees earn degrees, and pathways designed for students whose schedules a traditional campus could not accommodate.
Design Recognition
The magazine's visual presentation earned professional honours. In the 2009 American Inhouse Design Awards, sponsored by Graphic Design USA, the Alumni Association's communications team won four awards, three of them for ASU Magazine cover stories published in 2008 — features on creating a university, on big ideas, and on the future of the city — with a fourth award for materials promoting the Founders' Day dinner. The contest drew more than 4,000 entries that year and honoured fewer than 400 groups, placing the magazine's design work in a select national company. Covers mattered for ASU Magazine because its readers encountered the university largely through print and screen; a striking cover was often the only physical reminder of Tempe to reach a graduate's home each season, competing for attention with every commercial magazine on the coffee table.
Covering the New American University
Editorially, ASU Magazine became the storyteller of the university's transformation under Michael Crow. A representative issue in September 2011, as Crow began his tenth year as president, led with an exclusive question-and-answer interview with him and a report on his impact, in which figures including a United States senator, the mayor of Phoenix and the president of the NCAA reflected on his leadership. Crow explained how the New American University idea — a university committed to access, excellence and impact, taking responsibility for the economic, social and cultural vitality of its surrounding communities — had evolved as it was tested in practice. Other features in the same issue covered the expansion of the Pac-12 athletic conference, programmes joining creative study to business skills, news from around the university and the regular Class Notes. The pattern was typical: one substantial idea, explored from several angles, surrounded by the shorter reporting that keeps alumni oriented in a university adding programmes, campuses and partnerships at exceptional speed.
Research, Community and Alumni Achievement
Beyond presidential themes, ASU Magazine ranged across the university's work. Its March issues in the early 2010s, for example, highlighted security research and nature-inspired design, a sports story about student-athletes giving back through community service, and reporting on the dance community's expansion into new fields. The magazine ran the association's first alumni writing contest, which drew nearly 200 entries from graduates; the winning nonfiction and fiction pieces, and the best very short entries in a category limited to 140 characters, were published in the March 2011 issue, an experiment that turned readers into contributors. Association president Christine K. Wilkinson praised the entries for narratives that brought a real or imagined time and place to life and communicated values such as empathy, trust and critical thinking. Such contests, profiles and research features served a strategic purpose for a young research university — classified as a top-level research institution only in 1994 — by building, story by story, an alumni understanding of ASU as a place of discovery as well as of teaching.
From Print to Digital: The Road to Thrive
ASU was early among universities in treating the alumni magazine as a digital product as well as a printed one. By the early 2010s readers could read ASU Magazine online and through a dedicated tablet application. In 2014 the university launched ASU Thrive as an interactive digital magazine application, presenting stories through text, video and audio, with links to further sources; its inaugural issue carried video stories on the university's first charter, its Salute to Service, the fiftieth anniversary of ASU Gammage auditorium, and the addition of men's ice hockey to Sun Devil athletics, alongside Alumni Association features on intelligent cities, transformative learning and public art. A second Thrive issue, themed on access, expanded from tablets to desktop and laptop browsers, covering the integration of the Thunderbird School of Global Management, a global freshman programme offered with an online learning partner, and the expansion of a well-known programme helping coffee company employees earn ASU degrees. In time Thrive became the magazine's continuing title, published from Tempe in print for subscribers who choose it and in a digital edition for everyone else.
ASU Thrive and the Continuing Magazine
Under the Thrive name, the magazine ASU Magazine built continues on a quarterly rhythm; a recent volume, dated September 2026 and numbered volume 29, number 4, illustrates the continuity of numbering from the earlier title. Its featured stories included alumni who traced their careers to their honours college education, an inside look at the funding and mentoring networks that turn students into entrepreneurs, research using fungus to stabilise land after wildfires, a sixtieth anniversary history of Hayden Library as a centre of student life, a sampling of famous alumni from actors and athletes to business leaders, and practical features on building influence at work and on the careers expected to define the next decade. Readers can manage print or digital subscriptions through the university, supplying their member information from the mailing label to switch formats. The blend — entrepreneurship, sustainability research, campus memory and career advice — is recognisably the same editorial formula ASU Magazine developed, updated for a readership that now includes vast numbers of online graduates.
Tempe and the Phoenix Metropolitan Setting
The magazine's home, Tempe, is a city whose growth has been intertwined with the university since Tempe's founder Charles Hayden helped bring the normal school there in 1885. ASU now operates across the Phoenix metropolitan area, with campuses in Tempe, downtown Phoenix, Mesa and the West Valley, among others, and its Sun Devils compete at the highest level of college sport, with maroon and gold colours and Sparky the Sun Devil as mascot. ASU Magazine chronicled that metropolitan expansion for alumni, many of whom remembered a single campus of palm-lined walks around Old Main, the 1890s building that still anchors the Tempe campus. Stories about downtown development, light rail, research parks and partnerships with the cities around the university helped graduates understand a Sun Devil presence far larger than the one they had known as students, and reinforced the charter's promise that the university accepts responsibility for the health of the communities it serves.
Why the Magazine Matters
For a university that deliberately chose scale, the alumni magazine is not a decorative extra; it is one of the few instruments capable of giving a community of hundreds of thousands a shared story. ASU Magazine performed that work for decades in print, reaching more than 300,000 readers at its height, winning national design awards, and translating an abstract institutional idea — the New American University — into individual faces: a president explaining his model, an athlete volunteering in the community, a graduate winning a writing contest, an employee earning a degree through a workplace partnership. Its continuation as ASU Thrive, in print and interactive digital editions from Tempe, preserves that function for an alumni body that now includes graduates on several continents and in fully online programmes. The title changed, but the assignment did not: to show Sun Devils, wherever they studied and wherever they now live, what their university is becoming, and to persuade them that they belong to the story.
