Academic scheduling is higher ed’s most overlooked student success strategy

*This Op-Ed was originally published in University Business. Terry Brown is Vice President for Academic Innovation and Transformation at AASCU. Tom Shaver is Founder and CEO of Ad Astra.

While American higher education remains squarely in the public crosshairs, the nation’s colleges and universities have gone on the defensive, causing them to lose sight of several recent major successes.

College enrollment has recovered its dramatic pandemic-era losses and continues to grow steadily. The net price of college has been stable or declining for the past two decades.

Confidence in higher education and satisfaction with the value of college are on the rebound. And in a significant but underappreciated trend, the percentage of the American population with postsecondary credentials has climbed steadily for more than a decade. Today, nearly half of Americans 25 and older have earned a college degree.

These recent gains should inspire optimism throughout higher education because they show what’s possible when institutional leaders, policymakers, and advocates focus on the core areas of access, cost, and student success.

Yet there is another foundational piece of the college access, cost and success puzzle that deserves a similar level of attention from institutional leaders: academic scheduling.

Course scheduling determines which courses will be offered and how they will be offered. For institutions, it dictates the cost of instruction, one of the largest expenses in a university’s budget, and allocation of classroom space, an institution’s most valuable capital resource. For students, the course schedule determines how they access their courses and travel the pathway to graduation.

In short, academic scheduling is the engine of student success. If this engine is inefficient, it can delay learners’ progress, drive up their debts, and increase institutional expenses, which might be passed on to students.

And if it breaks down entirely, students cannot advance—and cannot graduate on time—even if an institution has exemplary advising, high-impact pedagogies, and a campus that makes all learners feel like they belong.

Yet at many institutions, course schedules often create a barrier to degree progress because the courses offered—and when they’re offered—are frequently misaligned with students’ needs.

According to Ad Astra’s most recent analysis of scheduling effectiveness, 71% of completion paths are blocked because they are missing required courses, which forces students to find alternative paths that cost additional time and money. A forthcoming report reveals that fewer than 30% of students at most institutions can follow their intended academic pathway for an academic year.

Prioritizing academic scheduling, given its profound impact on the lives of students, requires institutional leaders to take an integrated approach that ensures that everyone on campus understands the roles they should play in breaking down the barriers that stand in the way of student success.

Four academic scheduling priorities:

1Creating a shared vision.

Instead of treating scheduling as the collective responsibility of individual academic departments, leaders must help orchestrate a cohesive and comprehensive process that aligns scheduling with institutional goals. Working with their provosts and chief financial officers, institutional leaders should ensure the community understands the connection between scheduling and student and institutional outcomes, then set academic progress and financial goals for the entire institution.

2Building the blueprint.

Institutional leaders should empower deans and associate provosts to define sustainable completion paths for every academic program and translate the overall vision into program-level strategies and plans. In many instances, this will require reducing complexity because it’s incredibly difficult to offer the right mix of courses at times and in modalities that neatly align with student needs.

3Making the strategy real by refining, executing, and tracking progress.

Department chairs and the registrar’s office should build, publish and audit an academic year schedule that advances institutional goals and strategies. They also should keep a close eye on registration to reduce last-minute changes.

4Monitoring progress.

Institutional leaders should work with key campus stakeholders to determine if scheduling practices are driving student success and identify any remaining barriers to continuous improvement.

How to build confidence

The evidence from the partnership between our two organizations shows that when institutions use academic scheduling to build paths that lead directly to students’ academic goals, students can take more classes and earn more credits.

Enhanced structure and stronger momentum lead to institutional wins, such as increased retention, additional tuition revenue, and improved student progress and success that attract more students and builds public confidence.

• At Mohawk Valley Community College in New York, a significant number of students were stopping out because they took courses that didn’t count toward their degree and ran out of money to finish their program. After the college analyzed its scheduling practices, credit hour accumulation, and degree pathways, it identified roadblocks, refined course sequences, and straightened routes to completion. The changes improved retention by 17% and completion by 10%.
  
  
• Texas A&M University-San Antonio is one of 20 institutions participating in AASCU’s national initiative that seeks to make course scheduling a central piece of student success strategy. In an earlier pilot program that set the stage for this new project, the university increased the number of students taking 15 or more semester credit hours by 22 percentage points. These improvements may significantly reduce the decrease to degree and reduce the cost of attendance.