The citizens of a populus are indeed the cives, so yes, calling them populi is not correct. I don't quite get it though. They're just students again, discipuli. What makes them a populus?

Open Loop pioneer Phil Pizzo once noted, “Where we once had an association of alumni looking fondly back at Stanford as just one time in their lives, we now have a populi of 215,000 ongoing students who know that Stanford is there—and theirs—throughout a lifetime.

Does this mean that 215,000 alumni have continued engagement with the university? It's unclear, but that's the sense I get.

In this case, what about a word for 'returners'? We could do the perfect participle of either of the two deponent verbs for 'return', which yields reversi or regressi. You even have Latin phrases like regressus domum or reversus domum, which mean 'having returned home,' which I think Stanford is trying to get it.

The citizens of a populus are indeed the cives, so yes, calling them populi is not correct. I don't quite get it though. They're just students again, discipuli. What makes them a populus?

Open Loop pioneer Phil Pizzo once noted, “Where we once had an association of alumni looking fondly back at Stanford as just one time in their lives, we now have a populi of 215,000 ongoing students who know that Stanford is there—and theirs—throughout a lifetime.

Does this mean that 215,000 alumni have continued engagement with the university? It's unclear, but that's the sense I get.

In this case, what about a word for 'returners'? We could do the perfect participle of either of the two deponent verbs for 'return', which yields reversi or regressi. You even have Latin phrases like regressus domum or reversus domum meaning 'having returned home,' which I think Stanford is trying to get at.