Lessons Learned: What One Year of Student-Centered Course Scheduling Taught Us

For most colleges and universities, the course schedule is treated as back-office logistics. A growing body of research suggests course scheduling is a lever for student success, rather than a puzzle to be solved each term. For many students, especially those balancing work, caregiving, and tight finances, the schedule itself can be the difference between staying enrolled and stopping out.

That's the premise behind AASCU's Student-Centered Course Scheduling initiative. With funding from Ascendium Education Group, AASCU partnered with Ad Astra, a firm specializing in academic scheduling data, to give 20 regional public universities the tools, data coaching, and peer network to rebuild how they create their schedules.

The work builds on an earlier 11-institution pilot conducted from 2022-24, which found that even modest scheduling changes could measurably shorten students' path to a degree. Over the past year, a cohort of institutions worked through a simple but revolutionary question: What would it take to build a course schedule around what students need?