How Small Schools Compete With Big School Course Catalogs

TL;DR

• You will never win a course-count contest against a school with ten times your enrollment. You don't have to. You have to be credible — enough depth that a family's specific kid can point at something and say "that one."
• The gap is an arithmetic problem, not a curriculum problem. A single additional teaching line runs $47,000–$70,000 a year, which is why a school of 150 stalls at 20-something courses no matter how good the faculty meeting was.
• Online, credit-bearing electives supervised by one existing teacher are how small schools add catalog depth per seat instead of per hire. Price it per student, pilot it for a term, and publish it in your admissions material only after a cohort has finished.

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Every spring I have some version of the same conversation with a head of school. They've just lost two or three students to the big public high school down the road, or to the larger Christian school two towns over. The exit interviews all rhyme: we loved it here, but she wants to do something with medicine and you don't have anything.

Then they open the competitor's course catalog on their phone and scroll. Ninety-odd courses. Forensics. Sports medicine. Three levels of Spanish. A whole computer science sequence. Their own catalog is one page, and half of it is required.

That's the moment the head of school starts thinking they have a curriculum problem. They don't. They have an arithmetic problem, and it's a solvable one — but only if you stop trying to solve it the way the big school does.

Why do families leave a small school for a bigger one?

It is almost never because the big school is better. Families who chose a small private or Christian school already priced in the tradeoff. They picked the small class, the known teachers, the mission. They are not shopping for anonymity.

They leave when their particular student hits a wall. The kid who is serious about healthcare, or business, or design, or law, and can see three years of course sheets ahead of them with nothing on it that points anywhere. The parent doesn't frame it as "your catalog is short." They frame it as "we don't think she'll be challenged."

This matches what researchers find in small and rural schools generally, where limited course access is one of the clearest structural disadvantages — nearly half of rural students attend a school offering only one to three advanced courses. The mechanism is identical at a 150-student Christian school. Fewer students means fewer sections means fewer teachers means fewer courses.

And it compounds in admissions. Prospective families tour, love the community, then ask for the course catalog. That PDF is doing enrollment work whether you designed it to or not.

How many courses does a small school actually need?

Fewer than you think, and this is the most freeing thing I can tell you.

You are not trying to match ninety courses. You are trying to clear a credibility bar. In practice that bar has three parts:

1. A real choice at every grade level. A sophomore should be able to choose, not be assigned.
2. At least two or three visible directions. Not a fully built academy — a recognizable sequence a student can follow for two years. Healthcare. Business. Technology. Something with a name a fifteen-year-old can say out loud.
3. Real credit on the transcript. Enrichment doesn't count. If it isn't a Carnegie Unit that a college admissions reader recognizes, it doesn't do the job for the family.

Here's the part small schools consistently undersell: college admissions offices read a student's transcript in the context of what their school offered. A student who took the most rigorous load available at a school with a narrow catalog is not penalized for the narrowness. But that only works if the catalog has something rigorous in it to take. The problem isn't that you have 24 courses instead of 90. The problem is if the 24 are all required.

Why the catalog stops growing at 20-something courses

Run the arithmetic and it explains itself.

Adding a course the traditional way means adding sections, and eventually adding a line. A private school teaching line costs $47,000–$70,000 a year all-in. Spread across a school of 150 students, that is $310–$470 per student for one teacher who can cover, realistically, four or five distinct preps.

So one new hire buys you maybe five courses — and only if you can find someone certified in that subject who wants a part-time-ish load at private school pay. Finding a qualified science or CS teacher is hard everywhere and hardest in small and rural markets.

That's the whole story. It isn't ambition or vision. It's that catalog depth has historically been priced per hire, and a small school can only afford so many hires. We broke that math down course by course in what a private school teacher actually costs per seat.

The move is to change what you're buying, not to buy more of it.

Can a small school add courses without hiring teachers?

Yes — and it's now the mainstream answer, not an exotic one. Small districts have been doing versions of this for two decades through virtual learning collaboratives, where a school buys access to licensed-teacher-taught courses instead of staffing them.

What's changed recently is quality and supervision. The old model was a student alone in a computer lab with a video course and a 20% completion rate. That version deserved its reputation. The current model is different in three ways that matter to a head of school:

• The course pushes back. An AI tutor inside every lesson that won't accept a one-word answer does more real instructional work than a recorded lecture ever did. This is the entire difference between a course a student enrolls in and a course a student finishes.
• One teacher supervises many. Your existing faculty member becomes teacher of record for a study-hall-style block, watching progress on a dashboard rather than prepping five new subjects. We covered the accreditation side of that arrangement in teacher of record for AI-delivered courses.
• It's credit-bearing. Standards-aligned, Carnegie Unit, prints to a transcript. If it isn't, it isn't a catalog entry — it's an activity.

The practical mechanics of doing this without a new line are laid out in how private schools add electives without hiring teachers.

Do online electives count toward accreditation seat time?

This is the first question every serious head of school asks, and rightly. Short version: seat time is about documented instructional hours and evidence of learning, not about whether a licensed adult stood in front of the room for all of them.

What your accreditor generally wants to see is a named teacher of record, a syllabus with standards alignment, documented time-on-task, graded student work, and a grade that lands on an official transcript. A well-run online elective produces better documentation than a traditional class — every submission, every timestamp, every rubric score is already logged.

What gets schools in trouble is the vendor that can't produce a standards crosswalk or a printable progress record. Ask for both before you sign anything. We wrote the full checklist in accreditation requirements for online elective credit.

What this costs per student

Here is the comparison that actually decides it.

Traditional: one teaching line, $47,000–$70,000/yr, roughly 4–5 new courses, plus recruiting time and the risk that the hire doesn't renew.

Per-seat: Elective Genius runs $149 per student per year, dropping to $129 at 25 students and $109 at 50. Founding schools pay $99 per student for year one — that offer is open, with a 10-student minimum and no close date attached to it. What a seat buys is the full library: 55 courses — 31 high school and 24 middle school — across six career pathways (Healthcare, Business & Finance, Technology, Law & Society, Creative & Communication, and Life & Career Readiness), each course carrying 0.5 credit.

For a school of 150 putting 40 students into electives, that's roughly $5,200 a year at the 25+ tier — against $47,000+ for a hire that would cover a fraction of the same ground. That's not a marginal improvement in the budget. It's a different line item entirely.

You can see the full library at /courses and the school-side terms at /schools and /pricing.

The order of operations before re-enrollment season

Do not publish a catalog you haven't run yet. That's the mistake that costs trust.

This month — audit the gap. List the courses your competitor offers that you don't, and cross out everything nobody has actually asked for. You'll usually be left with three or four real directions, not ninety.

Next — name one teacher of record. Not a new hire. An existing faculty member with a supervisory block. If you can't name the person, you're not ready.

Then — pilot one cohort for one term. Ten students, one term, a decision date set before you start. Measure completion rate, supervisor hours per week, and whether the finished student work is good enough to show a parent on a tour. Our six-week elective pilot playbook has the full measurement plan, and a supervisor dashboard is what makes one teacher watching thirty students realistic.

Only then — put it in the admissions material. Publish the pathways once a cohort has finished one. Promise what you've already delivered.

The honest version

We built this because we ran into the same arithmetic at our own school. Rosedale Christian Academy runs every student in grades 6–12 on Elective Genius. Every decision here gets tested on our own students before it gets recommended to anyone else's.

What I won't do is hand you outcome statistics from other schools — we're early, and inventing those would be the fastest way to deserve the skepticism online electives have earned over the years. What I can tell you precisely is what a seat costs, how long setup takes, and that a supervising teacher can run a cohort inside an existing block.

The bigger school will always have a longer catalog. That was never the contest. The contest is whether the family touring your campus in February can find the thing their kid is actually excited about on your course sheet. That one you can win this year.

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Start your pilot

Start Your Free Pilot → — put one cohort through one term before re-enrollment season. First two weeks free, 10-student minimum, live in under a week.

Or book a 15-minute call and we'll map your catalog against the school you're losing students to. Full details on the school program and pricing.

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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.