By Dr. Tina DeNeen, Associate Executive Director, Education and Member Development, AACRAO
Learners increasingly move across institutional, state, provincial, national and global boundaries. Yet the systems responsible for recognizing their learning—academic records, credentials, credit transfer, admissions, and student services—do not always move as easily.
That challenge is helping drive a growing collaboration among three organizations representing the professionals at the center of these systems: AACRAO in the United States, the Association of Registrars of the Universities and Colleges of Canada, and Mexico’s Asociación de Responsables de Servicios Escolares y Estudiantiles.
Together, AACRAO, ARUCC, and ARSEE form a North American Learning Mobility Alliance built around a simple premise: understanding one another’s higher education systems—and the professionals who make those systems work—can help us identify opportunities to make learning and credentials more mobile across borders.
Three Countries: An Alliance of Shared Opportunities
Each association brings a different perspective and area of expertise to the Alliance.
- AACRAO contributes extensive experience in credential evaluation, registrarial standards, admissions, and enrollment management.
- ARUCC brings expertise in registrarial practice, transcript standards, and learner-records exchange.
- ARSEE represents professionals responsible for enrollment, records, and student services across Mexican institutions.
Collectively, the associations represent professionals involved throughout the lifecycle of learners moving among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.
The Alliance is exploring opportunities for collaboration in areas including credential recognition, records and data-exchange standards, professional development, learning mobility, shared advocacy, and terminology alignment.
The partnership is also creating opportunities for professionals in all three countries to learn directly from one another. This year, that work is taking shape through a three-part webinar series examining higher education across North America and the possibilities for greater regional collaboration.
Starting with Understanding
The series began on August 4, 2026 with “Educational Models in North America: Points of Interaction and Opportunities for Collaboration Among the United States, Canada, and Mexico.” (View the recording.)
Presenters from the three countries provided a comparative look at how their postsecondary systems are structured, governed, and delivered. The conversation examined educational structures, governance models, and trends affecting enrollment and credentialing, giving participants a clearer understanding of how each system operates.
That foundational knowledge matters. Before institutions and associations can improve the movement of learners, credits, credentials, and records across borders, professionals need to understand the systems on the other side of those borders.
The August session established that foundation. The next two webinars move the conversation from understanding our respective systems toward examining how learning moves among them—and where greater collaboration may be possible.
September 25: Advancing Academic Mobility and Recognition
You can register for the second webinar, “Educational Innovation and Transformation: Advancing Academic Mobility and Recognition of Studies,” on September 25, 2026, 2-3 p.m. ET.
Higher education across North America is being reshaped by many of the same forces: greater curriculum flexibility, microcredentials, hybrid and lifelong learning models, and increasing demand for pathways that recognize learning wherever it occurs.
The webinar will examine how the United States, Canada, and Mexico are responding to this shift toward more flexible, modular, and accessible education.
The discussion will then turn to a challenge familiar to AACRAO members: What happens when that learning needs to move?
Presenters will explore approaches to credit transfer, equivalency, and recognition of prior learning across the three countries, along with practices that can make the mobility of learning more consistent throughout the region.
October 28: From Shared Challenges to Shared Solutions
You can register for the final webinar, “Academic Records and Student Services Management: Opportunities for Regional Collaboration,” on October 28, 2026, 2-3 p.m. ET, and will focus on the infrastructure behind student mobility.
Admissions, transcripts, credentials, academic records, and increasingly digital processes all play a role in a learner’s ability to move successfully between institutions and across borders. The session will examine how these functions operate in the United States, Canada, and Mexico and consider the role comprehensive student support plays within each system.
The webinar will also look ahead.
Where can AACRAO, ARUCC, and ARSEE—and the institutions and professionals they represent—work together? What practices can we share? What joint initiatives might be possible? And how might stronger international professional networks help us address challenges that increasingly extend beyond national boundaries?
Those questions point to the larger purpose of both the webinar series and the Alliance itself.
A North American Professional Community
The differences among the higher education systems of the United States, Canada, and Mexico are significant. But so are the challenges and opportunities they share.
Professionals across all three countries are navigating changing credentials, evolving technology, new approaches to learning, growing expectations for mobility, and the need to ensure that learners’ educational achievements can be understood and recognized wherever their journeys take them.
The Alliance creates a forum for learning from those differences while finding areas where collaboration can make our collective work stronger.
The September 25 and October 28 webinars are free to attend, making the conversations accessible to professionals across all three countries.
share