Discover how tertiary education institutions in Australia and New Zealand can use AI to support students with more effective academic planning and program advice.
Institutions across Australia and New Zealand are adapting to ongoing reforms, with national policies increasingly focused on offering students more flexible study options, improved access to tertiary education and lifelong learning. The overall aim is to improve outcomes for students and cut the number of learners who discontinue their studies within the first year, which remain stubbornly high.
Australia’s Universities Accord and New Zealand’s Tertiary Education Strategy 2025–2030 are both key to driving change. They aim to offer learners new pathways to enter, pause and return to tertiary education as their circumstances and career goals evolve. This flexibility is important, but it will require students to make more decisions over longer timeframes. Learners need clear, personalised guidance on what to study, when to take each step, and how their choices keep them on track for completion.
Growing Pressure on Academic Planning and Student Advising
While some degrees still follow a largely lock-step structure, many institutions are already offering highly flexible programs with multiple entry points, elective choices, and non-linear pathways. This shift is expanding opportunity for students, but academic planning and guidance is struggling to keep pace.
Traditional approaches were built around relatively predictable student journeys. A student in a degree would typically follow a defined sequence of subjects over several years to reach graduation. Today, that clarity is harder to maintain. Students are navigating more choice than ever, often across disconnected systems, with course handbooks that can be cumbersome to interpret for staff and students alike.
At the same time, staff are under growing pressure to deliver accurate, timely advice as program rules become more complex. This makes consistency harder to maintain and increases the likelihood that students receive different answers depending on who they speak to — or miss out on the personalised guidance they need for their individual circumstances.
Managing Manual Planning Processes at Scale
Many academic planning processes still rely heavily on manual workflows.
Many institutions still lack dedicated academic planning tools altogether, leaving students to “best-guess” their way through program requirements. Where planning tools do exist, they often struggle to keep up with the growing complexity of program structures.
As a result, students can interpret requirements differently, leading to study plans that may not align with what’s needed for on-time completion. Course coordinators and academic advisors then spend significant time checking, validating and correcting those plans, adding to already increasing workloads.
What may once have been manageable with more predictable cohorts and standardised pathways is becoming far more resource intensive. As flexibility increases, so too does the risk of errors — making this approach increasingly difficult to sustain.
Less Predictable Study Pathways
Students are entering tertiary education through a wider range of pathways than in the past, including credit from previous tertiary study, and non-traditional entry routes such as mature-age entry or work-based experience. Their study patterns are also more likely to change after enrolment as they adapt to the impact of results, work commitments, financial pressures or changing career goals.
This creates a more complex planning process. Students are no longer moving through study in the same sequence or at the same pace, which makes it harder for institutions to rely on standard planning models and assumptions about progression. Academic planning can no longer be treated as a one-off activity. It needs to support ongoing decision-making, giving students and advisors the flexibility to adjust plans as circumstances change with a clear view of the long-term goals.
Improve Planning and Academic Advice with Connected Data and AI
Ellucian Smart Planning and Registration offers a suite of AI-powered capabilities designed to simplify planning for students, strengthen decision-making for advisors, and ensure compliance for institutions.
AI-driven recommendations help institutions to translate program requirements and student data into clearer, more actionable academic pathways, all whilst maintaining compliance with academic requirements. Smart Planning and Registration will always use the most up-to-date information about a student’s results, credit for prior learning, course offerings, availability, prerequisites, restrictions, student choices and more, and automatically adjust when any of these factors change, clearing showing the implications of those changes.
With a more consistent academic planning process, advisors and learners themselves can see a clearer pathway to completion and also how decisions can affect this throughout the learning journey.
A Personalised Academic Plan from the Start
Students can see a clear, structured academic pathway based on program specifications, course prerequisites, sequencing rules and their individual study history. Rather than interpreting complex program structures themselves, they have access to a defined pathway showing them what to study and in what order, from enrolment through to completion.
This provides clarity from day one, reduces the time advisors spend checking requirements and correcting plans, and helps ensure program rules and accreditation requirements are automatically applied consistently across cohorts.
Real-Time Visibility of How ‘What if’ Scenarios Could Affect Study Choices and Progression
Academic plans use the most up to date student and course data, and they adjust automatically as circumstances change or as students explore different study choices.
Students can test “what if” scenarios such as changing majors, adjusting study load or taking time away from study. Each option generates a fully recalculated academic plan, showing a clear, term-by-term pathway through to completion – including updated graduation dates and financial implications such as additional course fees or costs.
This helps students understand the practical consequences of their decisions before they commit, supports more confident planning, and reduces the need for advisors to manually rebuild alternative pathways.
Registration Aligned with Academic Planning
Students enrol directly from a validated academic plan, with program rules, prerequisites and enrolment constraints applied automatically in real time.
This reduces common issues such as incorrect subject selection or missing prerequisites, which can delay progression and increase administrative workload for advisors during peak enrolment periods.
Registration becomes a seamless extension of planning, helping students to stay on track without the need for advisors to intervene.
A Connected Academic Planning and Student Advising Environment
Academic planning, program rules and student data are brought together in a single connected data ecosystem. This reduces duplication across an institution, improves consistency of information and ensures students and advisors are always working from the latest data.
The result is a smoother experience for students, less friction for staff, and more meaningful interactions across the institution to support better outcomes.
AI-Enabled Planning and Program Advice for Tertiary Education Students
By embedding AI into academic planning and program advising, tertiary education institutions can support more consistent progression, reduce avoidable delays and provide more personalised guidance to students at scale.
Find out how Ellucian Smart Planning and Registration can make it easier for your institution to support student success.
