July Spotlight: Overlap — Graduation-Focused Scheduling Intelligence
Every semester, thousands of students miss graduation requirements by a single class or semester — not because they’re lazy, but because they didn’t know what to take, when to take it, or how it all fit together. Overlap solves that.
Overlap is a scheduling intelligence platform that helps students and universities close the gap between degree requirements and actual graduation timelines. By analyzing course offerings, major requirements, and personal credit histories, Overlap generates optimized class schedules that ensure students take exactly what they need — no fluff, no guesswork, no delays.
“Advisors are overworked. Students are overwhelmed. Overlap brings structure to the chaos,” said founder Alan Solis Elrod.
At its core, Overlap uses a hybrid AI framework that converts PDF or text-based major requirements into executable logic, then cross-references this with every class a university offers. Whether a student is double majoring, switching departments, or trying to graduate early, Overlap finds the cleanest path forward — often saving thousands in tuition and housing costs.
Driving Retention, Graduation Rates & Resource Allocation
Most universities struggle to track students’ progress in real time. Overlap flips the model: it doesn’t just track — it strategizes. It builds full-term schedules that satisfy the right combinations of Gen Eds, electives, major requirements, and course sequences based on actual institutional rules.
For students, this means graduating faster. For universities, it means better retention, higher credit completion, and smoother course load distribution. One simulation at UNC Chapel Hill showed that even partial deployment could cut average graduation timelines by a semester, freeing up dorm space and boosting advisor bandwidth.
“Without Overlap, I was taking random electives and hoping it all worked out. Now I know exactly what’s left and when to take it,” said one student beta tester.
Current Development
Overlap has completed initial pilots using UNC’s full course catalog and dozens of parsed major requirement files. It's currently in negotiation with UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, UIUC, and Stanford to deploy beta integrations.
As new schools are onboarded, Overlap adapts to each campus’s unique degree structures, Gen Ed systems, and scheduling constraints — even accommodating transfer credit and study abroad exceptions. Every implementation uses the same flexible AI logic core, making it scalable without sacrificing specificity.
Future updates include student-facing dashboards, real-time advisor tools, and financial modeling to help institutions predict and optimize credit flow, course demand, and student success rates.