Course Scheduling: A Problem We Keep Asking Students to Solve
The New York Times reported on a recent Instructure study about course availability, the article (A Vexing Problem for College Students: Course Availability) offered students advice for navigating scheduling challenges. Those recommendations miss the point. Navigating poor scheduling practices should not be the responsibility of students. It is the responsibility of institutions.
The authors of the Instructure report, Challenges to Course Availability for Higher Education Learners, Scanlan and Henschel, found that,
85% of students surveyed had trouble registering for a course they needed because it was full or not offered at a convenient time.
78% of students had difficulty staying on track for graduation or program completion due to course availability.
53% reported taking courses at another college to stay on track and the majority of these students found the enrollment and credit transfer processes confusing.
Brian Cully, senior vice president at Instructure was quoted in the New York Times article, “I was surprised just how pervasive it was.” I’m not. After working with colleges and universities across the country for almost three years to adopt student-centered course scheduling practices, these findings were not a surprise. By student-centered scheduling, I mean designing schedules that allow students to progress through their programs as intended, with access to the courses they need, when they need them.
Having spent much of my career at regional comprehensive institutions serving large numbers of first-generation, Pell-eligible, transfer, and rural students, I have seen firsthand how quickly a scheduling obstacle can become a completion obstacle. What may appear to be a simple registration challenge can easily become an additional semester, increased debt, or a student leaving college altogether.
The recommendations offered in the Times article are not bad advice. Students should understand degree requirements, seek information, and advocate for themselves. But those recommendations place the burden of navigating structural barriers on the very students most likely to struggle with them. Students whose families have a history of college attendance often benefit from informal guidance about course planning, transfer pathways, and institutional processes. First-generation students and families may not have access to that same knowledge. Asking them to evaluate institutions using tools such as College Scorecard or College Navigator assumes they know which metrics matter and how to interpret them. Likewise, recommending that students simply enroll elsewhere when needed courses are unavailable assumes alternatives exist. For many rural students, working adults, and students with caregiving responsibilities, another institution may not be within reach. When 85% of students report difficulty accessing needed courses and more than half report taking courses elsewhere to stay on track, we are no longer talking about individual student navigation challenges. We are talking about institutional design challenges.
Navigating poor scheduling practices should not be the responsibility of our students. It’s the responsibility of the institution. Course scheduling may be the most powerful at-scale lever institutions control for improving time to degree. If that's true, why haven't more institutions addressed it? The answer is that course scheduling is far more complex than it appears from the outside.
In my experience, most people aren't resisting student-centered scheduling. They simply haven't connected the course schedule to degree completion. The moment a department realizes a student cannot actually complete the published pathway under current scheduling practices, the conversation changes.
The consequences of ineffective scheduling extend beyond students. Delayed progression often translates into lower retention, reduced graduation rates, excess credits, and inefficient use of institutional resources. Courses that are consistently under-enrolled, classrooms that sit empty during prime instructional hours, and scheduling conflicts that prevent students from progressing all carry real costs. In performance-funding states, these outcomes can also have direct budget implications. Improving course scheduling is not simply a student success strategy—it is an institutional effectiveness strategy.
Just as course scheduling is an at-scale solution for improving student progress, it also touches nearly every aspect of institutional operations. Faculty build their lives and the lives of their families around their teaching schedules. Facilities build their maintenance routines around the course schedule. Residence Life, student organizations, career services, advising, financial aid, academic support services, admissions, all revolve around the course schedule. Because of that, care and attention is required to steward the change. When we ask people to make significant change, it’s uncomfortable and scary. It’s important to help people understand why the change is necessary and how the change will positively impact them.
Many institutions lack the ability to make sense of their course scheduling data. Outside of waitlists, fill rates, and perhaps primetime scheduling windows it is really difficult for them to see the problems that exist Institutions often struggle to identify patterns such as consistently over- or under-subscribed courses, the prevalence of single-section offerings, courses scheduled outside the standard scheduling grid, conflicts among required courses across departments, or indicators of degree momentum and student progression. These exist in the data but extracting them can be difficult and requires human capacity for manual analysis or financial capacity for a software tool. Once data is available, it can be challenging to know what to fix without guidance- after all, none of us were trained on effective course scheduling practices.
If an institution is interested in tackling course scheduling and doesn’t currently have the financial means to purchase a software tool (and even then, adopting a tool without stewarding the change for schedulers, department chairs, and associate deans to use the tool is money wasted), there are things you can do.
Create a cross-functional scheduling team. If you don’t currently have a cross-functional team supporting the schedule building process- you should. That means a representative from every college or school, your registrar, financial aid, enrollment management, advising, and perhaps even facilities. For some institutions, this could be a very large group. Trust me, it’s worth it. Without these perspectives, important information is lost or misunderstood. Without these champions, opportunities for champinoning the importance of student-centered scheduling is lost. There is expertise in these groups that is invaluable.
Start with the data you do have. If that’s fill rates, information from waitlists, classroom utilization, course rotations that aren’t honored, requests to offer a course outside of the scheduling grid- whatever it is bring it to bear and examine it against the backdrop of your time to degree (disaggregated by student populations) to better understand what might be contributing to extend time to degree. Pick a program and examine degree momentum for that student population. Some variables to start with include credits attempted versus completed and the proportion of credits taken and earned that are applicable to their program. Move program by program until you have a clearer picture.
Course Scheduling Policy & Practice Landscape Log. Leverage your cross-functional scheduling team to catalogue current scheduling policies, guidelines, and practices. If there isn’t consistency in the way we schedule or the way we approach decision-making around the schedule, this is one of the first places to start.
Pressure test your schedule. Pick a program and pull the published pathway (guidance to students about what to take when) and the published schedules for the most recent two semesters. Assuming the student makes all the right choices and has no scheduling restrictions can the student complete on time? This is the conversation starter! And the persona recommended here is important because it strips away what we often hide behind. Students work and can’t take a full course load, students have other obligations that restrict the times they can take courses, students don’t want morning classes, students make poor choices when scheduling. These may be true, but they aren’t reasons to not attempt to fix what’s broken. When your scheduled courses don’t align with the pathway you’ve recommended your students to take, it doesn’t matter what restrictions are present.
Build a communication plan. These aren’t small tweaks around the edges. Course scheduling reform is a major undertaking and it can’t be perceived to be done in a vacuum. Be prepared to make the case for why these changes are important (pro-tip, don’t only lean into budget as the primary driver. There’s lots of reasons to do better, budget is just one of them). Be prepared to share often what you’re learning and the potential strategies to improve areas of weakness. Celebrate areas of strength and milestones along the way. Get input from faculty, students, and those responsible for the administrative tasks associated with course scheduling. Be transparent about what was learned and how it informed change.
This work is difficult, but immensely rewarding. Course schedules touch every corner of an institution, and changing long-standing practices requires patience, communication, and trust. But we should not mistake complexity for impossibility. When students cannot access the courses they need to complete the pathways we have published, the solution is not to ask them to become better navigators. The solution is to build better systems.
In my experience, the moment people realize a student cannot actually complete a program as designed under current scheduling practices, the room shifts. What seemed like an operational issue suddenly becomes a student success issue. And once that connection is made, maintaining the status quo becomes much harder to justify.
