Corequisites Have Been Holding Out on You

Corequisites are one of the harder things to manage well in academic planning. The policy is usually clear: two courses, same term, taken together. But translating that policy into something students follow is a different challenge. Students build schedules without realizing two courses are linked, register for one without the other, and end up in a situation that requires manual intervention to untangle. Advisors catch it when they can, but they can't catch everything, and the students who don't have close advising relationships are the ones most likely to slip through.

Students aren't actively ignoring the rules when this happens. Corequisite relationships tend to live in the catalog or the SIS while planning happens somewhere else entirely, and there's rarely a moment where the connection becomes visible to a student who is actively building their schedule.

The most effective way to address this is bringing corequisite logic into the planning experience itself. When a student adds a course to their plan, the system recognizes that a linked course belongs alongside it and surfaces that connection in the moment, rather than leaving it to the student to discover on their own. If a student tries to drop one course from a connected pair, they're prompted to consider the full impact before confirming. At registration, guardrails can prevent a student from enrolling in one half of a corequisite relationship without the other.

When the planning experience and the enrollment system are working together this way the category of error that corequisites tend to produce (the late-stage scramble, the missed seat, the advisor firefighting) largely disappears. Students get clearer guidance at the moment it matters, and staff spend less time catching problems that could have been avoided earlier.

Once you have the infrastructure to connect courses in the planning experience, corequisite enforcement is actually just the starting point. The same functionality can support a broader set of programs that institutions may have had limited tools to address well.

• First-Year and Cohort Programs. Many institutions design their first-year experience around a shared set of courses that students move through together. The academic content matters, but so does the community that forms when students are navigating the same path at the same time. Connecting those courses in the planning experience reinforces the cohort model, makes the expected path visible to students from the start, and gives advisors a way to see when someone has drifted from the group before it becomes a harder conversation.
• Interest-Based Learning Communities. The same approach applies to cohorts built around a shared academic interest or career pathway. A pre-health learning community, a sustainability track, a business innovation cohort. These programs are intentionally designed, but that design often lives only in advising conversations and program guides. When course connections are visible in the planning experience, every student in the cohort has access to the same guidance, rather than only those who happen to have the right conversation at the right time.
• Structured Elective Sequences. Some programs use course connections more loosely, not to enforce a requirement but to represent a recommended progression through elective coursework. A student moving through a concentration might get more out of the curriculum by taking courses in a particular order, building from foundational to specialized. That arc is often communicated informally, which means students can satisfy their degree requirements while missing the intentional progression their program was designed to provide. Surfacing it in the planning experience makes it part of the student's decision-making process from the beginning.

Corequisites are the most visible, policy-driven version of a course connection, which is why they tend to get the most attention. But the underlying idea, that some courses are meant to be taken together, or in a particular order, or as part of a shared experience, applies across a much wider range of programs and student populations. Getting the coreq right is a good starting point. Thinking about where else that same structure could add value is where it gets interesting.