Whether you’re overseeing a registrar’s office, leading an advising team, or managing systems at the state level, you see it every day: students are increasingly building their own paths across multiple institutions to keep their momentum.
Because while we often talk about student success in terms of motivation or financial aid, there’s a sometimes hidden structural barrier that can stem success: course availability. Instructure just published the 2025 Challenges to Course Availability for Higher Education Learners Research Report and the data points to what many in higher ed have already seen. When students can’t find a seat at their home institution, they don't just wait; more students are taking matters into their own hands by enrolling in courses at other institutions to stay on schedule.
Our collective goal in education is to help ensure that their resourcefulness leads to a degree, not a dead end.
The rise of the academic architect
Today’s learners are becoming the architects of their own schedules out of necessity. They are proactive and tech-savvy, but they are also facing significant friction.
As we look at the data, a few key themes emerge that impact how we support our students:
- The drive for momentum: Over half of surveyed students (53%) have taken courses at another institution specifically to stay on track for graduation when a required course was unavailable at their home institution.
- The complexity hurdle: Even the most motivated students struggle; 90% of those who cross-enrolled found the process confusing.
- The credit risk: Perhaps most concerningly, 42% of students reported receiving only partial or no credit for external courses.
Modernizing the student experience
Educators and admins are working to turn these challenges into institutional strengths with course sharing initiatives. As institutions start building an academic mobility strategy, they’re seeing benefits like:
- Speed to enrollment: We’ve seen schools using Parchment Course Sharing transform what used to be a months-long manual process into a task completed in under two minutes.
- Support for smaller campuses: By leveraging a broader network, smaller institutions can offer a full portfolio of classes without the overhead of new faculty hires for niche requirements.
- Accelerated outcomes and funding: By eliminating wait times for "shutout" courses, students move toward graduation faster, which directly improves the performance-based funding metrics that states like Texas are now prioritizing. Under Texas’s House Bill 8 model, institutions are increasingly rewarded for specific outcomes (such as earning "credentials of value" and completing successful transfers) rather than just enrollment. Course sharing serves as a strategic tool to boost these metrics, ensuring students stay in motion rather than being forced into a holding pattern.
Students are rewriting what their success looks like every day. Our job is to provide the infrastructure that matches their ambition.
How is your institution handling the rise of cross-enrollment? We’d love to hear your success stories or challenges in the comments.
View the full Challenges to Course Availability for Higher Education Learners Research Report.
