How to Write a Course Catalog That Sells Your School

TL;DR

• Your course catalog is read by prospective families during the decision, not by enrolled students during scheduling. It is an admissions document that happens to also do scheduling — most schools have that backwards.
• Organize by where a course leads, not by which department owns it. A parent scanning a department list sees requirements. A parent scanning a pathway sees their kid's future.
• List every course you can legitimately deliver, including supervised online electives. A teaching line costs $47,000–$70,000 a year; a seat costs $149 and less at volume, which is how a small school lists twenty-four electives against one supervising teacher.

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Most course catalogs at small schools were written by a registrar, in a hurry, in a spreadsheet, sometime around 2019. Each year someone updates the courses that changed and re-exports the PDF. Nobody has read the whole thing start to finish in a long time, including the people who send it out.

Meanwhile it is one of the three documents a prospective family actually opens. Tuition schedule, calendar, course catalog. They will skim your mission statement and read your course catalog closely, because the catalog is where the mission stops being adjectives and becomes a list of things their kid could actually take.

That is the reframe worth making before you edit a single line: this document is doing enrollment work whether you designed it to or not. Here is how to write it on purpose.

Who actually reads a course catalog?

Three audiences, in this order of commercial importance:

Prospective parents, mid-decision. They have toured, they liked you, and they are now in the quiet part of the process — comparing you against the school down the road on a laptop at 9pm. They are not reading for prerequisites. They are reading for evidence that their specific child has somewhere to go here.

Current students and their parents, in course-selection season. These readers need the mechanics: credits, prerequisites, sequence, what counts toward graduation. This is the audience the catalog is usually written for, and they are the easiest to serve because they will ask a counselor anyway.

Your accreditor, occasionally. They will check that credits, hours, and graduation requirements are stated clearly and consistently. This is a floor, not a goal — and it is why catalogs drift toward compliance prose.

The failure mode at most small schools is writing exclusively for audience two, with a nod to audience three, and hoping audience one figures it out. Public school districts are open about the scheduling purpose — catalogs like Arlington's Program of Studies exist to guide course selection, and they should. But a district is not competing for those families. You are.

What should a course description actually include?

The conventional guidance is that a catalog should list offerings, prerequisites, credit values, and whether a course is required or elective — the practical scheduling minimum. That is necessary and it is not sufficient. A description that sells has five parts, and it fits in about ninety words:

1. What the student does — the verb, not the topic. "Builds a personal budget, files a mock return, and pitches a savings plan" beats "an introduction to personal finance concepts."
2. What it produces — an artifact. A portfolio piece, a project, a presentation, a certification. Parents remember tangible outputs.
3. What credit it earns — 0.5 credit, elective, counts toward the graduation requirement. State it plainly every time.
4. Who it is for — grade range and, more usefully, the kind of student. "For a student considering anything in medicine, including the ones who are not sure yet."
5. Where it leads — the next course, the pathway, the career field. This is the line almost everyone omits and the one a parent is actually scanning for.

Write in second person about the student, present tense, no hedging. Cut every instance of "students will be exposed to." Nobody enrolls their child to be exposed to something.

How do you organize it — by department or by pathway?

By pathway, with a department index in the back for the registrar.

A department-organized catalog is a filing system. It answers "what does the science department offer," which is a question no parent has ever asked. A pathway-organized catalog answers "what happens to a kid who is interested in X," which is the only question they are asking.

The practical version: group your electives into five or six named tracks — healthcare, business and finance, technology, law and society, creative and communication, life and career readiness are the six we use — and show the sequence inside each. A parent sees three or four courses in a row under "Healthcare" and reads it as a program. The same four courses scattered under Science, Social Studies, and Electives read as a rummage sale.

This is also the honest framing for a small school, because a track of four courses is a real thing you can deliver. We wrote up how the sequencing works in practice in building a Christian school career pathways program, and you can see the shape of six live pathways on the courses page.

How do you list courses you don't staff yourself?

Directly, in the same typeface, with the delivery model stated in one line.

Heads of school get nervous here, and the nervousness is worth naming. The fear is that a family reads "online" and hears "correspondence course" or "the teacher is a video." Two things resolve it:

Name the supervising teacher. Every course in your catalog should have a human attached to it at your school — the teacher of record who owns the grade, holds the roster, and answers the parent's email. That is true of a supervised online elective exactly as it is true of Algebra II. We worked through how that assignment actually functions in teacher of record for AI-delivered courses.

Describe the work, not the platform. "Students complete lessons, work through a guided conversation with an AI tutor that pushes back on one-word answers, and submit a graded project reviewed by their supervising teacher" tells a parent what the room looks like. "Delivered via our online partner" tells them nothing and sounds like outsourcing.

Do not create a segregated "Online Courses" appendix at the back. That is a self-inflicted wound — it visually demotes the courses and invites the exact question you are trying to answer.

How many courses should a small school list?

Enough that a specific kid can point at something. Not so many that you cannot deliver them.

The count question deserves its own treatment and we gave it one in how small schools compete with big school course catalogs. The short version: you will lose a course-count contest to a school with ten times your enrollment, and you do not need to win it. You need credible depth in a handful of directions.

What kills catalogs is the opposite failure — listing courses that run only if enough students sign up. A catalog full of maybes trains families not to trust it, and the first time a course is cancelled after a family enrolled partly because of it, you have spent real goodwill. If a course is conditional, say so in the description. If it is conditional three years running, cut it.

What does the catalog math look like?

This is where the arithmetic decides what you can honestly print.

A new teaching line runs $47,000–$70,000 a year all-in. That is the real reason a school of 150 stalls at twenty-something courses — not a lack of ambition in the faculty meeting. To add four electives by hiring, you are looking at a full salary plus benefits against maybe thirty enrollments across those sections.

Per-seat is the other shape. Elective Genius is $149 per student per year, $129 at 25+ seats, and $109 at 50+ — full pricing is on the pricing page, and founding school pricing is $99 per student for year one for the first ten schools, with no clock on it. Middle school Explorer seats are $49. One supervising teacher covers the room during a single period while students work through different courses.

Run it against your own numbers. Twenty students across four new electives at $129 is $2,580 — against a fraction of one salary line. That is not a marginal difference; it is a different category of decision, which is why it belongs in a budget conversation rather than a hiring one.

The catalog consequence is the point: a small school can print a genuine list of twenty-four electives, in pathways, with a teacher of record on each, and mean every word of it.

When should you publish it?

Earlier than you do now, and in HTML.

Most schools finalize the catalog in late winter for internal course selection, which puts the public version well behind the admissions cycle. Prospective families are comparing schools in the fall and winter. A catalog that goes live in March is late for the people it could most influence.

Two practical moves:

• Publish course descriptions as web pages, not only as a PDF. A PDF is invisible to search and awkward on a phone, which is where a parent is reading at 9pm. Individual course pages are indexable and linkable, and admissions can send one course to one family instead of a forty-page document.
• Put a next step at the bottom of every course page. Book a tour, ask a question, talk to the teacher. Standard admissions content practice, rarely applied to the catalog itself.

Add a new course mid-year if you can deliver it. There is no rule that the catalog is frozen — and the operational sequence for standing one up quickly is in how to run an elective pilot at a small private school.

The honest summary

A course catalog sells your school when it is written for the parent who is deciding, organized by where courses lead, specific about what a student does, and honest about how each course is delivered and who owns the grade.

The reason most small-school catalogs do not do that is not writing skill. It is that the list has been constrained by hiring math for so long that the document became an inventory of what you could staff. Change the math and the catalog gets to be a description of what you actually offer — which is the version worth putting in front of a family.

Start with one pathway. Write four descriptions the new way. Put them on the website as pages. See what admissions says.

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Start Your Pilot

If you want to see what four electives in one pathway would look like in your catalog — with per-seat numbers against your enrollment and a supervising teacher on each — start a pilot or book a school demo. Middle school pricing and the Explorer wheel are on the middle school page.

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About the author

Steve Smith is the founder of Elective Genius and spent 25 years in education before building it. He also runs Rosedale Christian Academy, where every middle- and high-school student uses the platform — which means every decision here gets tested on his own students first. Reach him at schools@electivegenius.com.