Course registration challenges are not a new problem. For as long as there have been students, there’s been the stress of signing up for courses — figuring out when your registration window opens, and setting alarms and reminders to ensure you log in and pick out your classes before anyone else.
Not all students are lucky enough to get the classes they need, an issue that can be more prevalent at public institutions due to budget constraints and lack of faculty.
In the age of artificial intelligence and ever-advancing technology, these complications should be a thing of the past. And they are for universities that connect the siloed data, utilize course sharing or remove students from the registration process entirely.
DISCOVER: CDW’s latest research report outlines how technology is eliminating friction.
The Consequences of Course Shutouts
Being unable to register for a desired class isn’t merely a disappointment; it also can delay graduation, which increases the cost of education and results in a loss of wages. A 2025 study by scholars at Purdue University and Brigham Young University found that when students are unable to register for needed courses — a concept known as course shutouts — it “reduces the probability that a student ever takes any course in the corresponding subject by 30%.” Female students are affected more so by a reduced cumulative GPA and decreased likelihood of majoring in STEM, the researchers found.
“First-year students who are initially shut out from a course are 35 percentage points less likely to ever complete the course and 25 percentage points less likely to take a course in the same subject,” the National Bureau of Economic Research working paper states.
Looking specifically at the two-year college setting, the consequences of course shutouts are even more dire: “Students shut out of a course are 22-28% more likely to take zero courses that term,” finds 2021 research by faculty at Princeton University and UCLA.
How Universities Are Using Technology as a Solution
To solve a lack of availability and to reach more students, some universities have turned to course sharing at their satellite campuses or offering virtual options. For example, the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, which has 14 campuses, has begun a pilot program that will allow students to take “advanced or specialized courses from other PASSHE universities without leaving their home campus,” explains a 2025 press release.
This pilot program “benefits students, especially on rural campuses,” the release states. The course sharing will be through a “unified student information platform across all campuses,” where students can “select classes, track progress and manage financial aid, tuition and scholarships in one place.”
READ MORE: PASSHE uses data to drive student success.
“Institutions need to rethink how their systems work together,” says Sam Dreyfus, executive vice president of ECPI University. “Manual processes can’t keep up. Systems need to be connected so admissions, advising, the registrar and faculty planning are all working from the same information.”
ECPI University is unique: Students don’t have to register for courses; the university handles that process for them. “Students should not be penalized because they did not click a button fast enough, understand a hidden prerequisite or know how to navigate a complex process,” Dreyfus says.
The students at ECPI University, a career-focused institution, are nontraditional. They’re 31 years old, on average, and are military-affiliated, parents or working full-time jobs, explains Dreyfus. “For that reason, our model, in many ways, is intentionally different from the traditional college experience.”
ECPI functions on an accelerated model: Students are in one class at a time, which changes every five weeks. Between the fast pace and the quick changes, ECPI takes all the stress of registration away from students. “We build structured pathways, proactively map the courses they need and register them in the appropriate sections from the beginning to the end of their education journey,” says Dreyfus. “Behind the scenes, we are balancing faculty availability, number of students and where each student is in their progression to make sure everything lines up.”
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To support this work, the university has layered several programs atop one another; that’s been the primary focus of their developers for the past 15 years, says Dreyfus. Not only do the systems communicate, but the university also uses predictive analytics to balance the demands of their students, creating a proactive approach to registration.
“Today’s learners are more mobile than ever, bringing credits, experience and different educational backgrounds with them,” says Dreyfus. “The goal should be to simplify the student’s role wherever possible. Use data to anticipate demand, build structured pathways, identify bottlenecks before registration opens and move transfer credit and prior learning decisions to earlier in the process.”
At Northeastern University, a collaboration between administration, faculty and students brought never-before-seen information to the forefront to begin to solve the university’s registration issues. Using AI, the students discovered that several majors required the same courses, information that was historically visible only in a curriculum platform. They used AI to review every course description in the catalog and created as dashboard to illustrate where alternative courses could be applied to reduce course shutouts.
“Drastic improvements in university operations do not necessarily require million-dollar technology investments up front,” writes Ingrid Nuttall, deputy registrar at Northeastern University, and Jessica Liebowitz, faculty director of the Student-Administrator Partnership at the university. “Thanks to customized data science and AI applications, we now have concrete, new ways of thinking about the bottleneck problem that were not visible before.”
