A recent article in The Hechinger Report (“Students can’t get into basic college courses, dragging out their time in school,” Sept. 2, 2025) underscores a systemic issue in higher education: students are often unable to access the courses they need to graduate on time. When institutions don’t offer enough sections of foundational classes, students are left scrambling – delaying graduation and, in many cases, increasing debt.

The article highlights promising efforts at places like Front Range Community College and the University of California, Merced, which use online learning to ease scheduling and capacity constraints. It’s an innovative approach that more institutions should adopt, especially for general education and freshman-level courses that serve large and fluctuating student populations.

At Modern States, we’ve taken a similar path. We work with college professors to create MOOC-style courses that cover standard college courses like Calculus, Chemistry, and Introduction to Psychology, and that prepare students to take CLEP (College Level Examination Program) exams. CLEP scores are recognized for credit at nearly 3,000 colleges and universities nationwide. By pairing high-quality, flexible online learning with widely accepted credit-bearing exams, we help students complete introductory college-level coursework on their own schedules – whether or not a seat is available in a crowded classroom.

In the past year alone, students from nearly 2,500 colleges and universities have registered with Modern States, reinforcing the demand for this kind of flexibility and affordability.

And critically, one learner enrolling in our courses doesn’t block another from doing the same at those institutions, or anywhere else. That kind of scalable, on-demand model is dramatically more difficult in traditional, capacity-limited classes. As the Hechinger Report article describes, the result too often is that students get left out through no fault of their own.

While our approach is best suited for introductory-level courses, freeing up those entry points helps relieve pressure throughout the system. Fewer bottlenecks at the 100-level increase faculty capacity to teach upper level classes and open up classroom space to higher-level courses or add extra sections where demand unexpectedly surges.

When course availability dictates student progress, we’re failing our learners. It’s time for more institutions to think outside the box about how to ensure that learners don’t fall off track to a life-changing degree due to factors outside their control.