By Quintina Barnett Gallion, Associate Executive Director, Strategy and Planning, AACRAO
“We got the program approved. We didn’t get the back-end ready.” That was how one registrar summed up what happened at their institution after its Prison Education Program launched. The program was real. The faculty were committed. Students were enrolling. And the administrative infrastructure—the enrollment workflows, the transcript processes, the FERPA protocols—had never been designed for a correctional environment.
Earlier this year, AACRAO conducted one-on-one interviews with members who have worked in or alongside Prison Education Programs—registrars, admissions professionals, enrollment managers, and faculty across two- and four-year institutions at every stage of PEP maturity, from decades-long programs to institutions in their second semester. The conversations were candid. The patterns were consistent.
The most important thing they revealed is this: When admissions operations and registrar professionals are absent from PEP design, learners pay the price.
What Happens When the Right People Aren’t at the Table
Consider what one enrollment management professional in Texas uncovered when they were brought in to manage the teach-out of a failing program at another institution: an 7% graduation rate traceable directly to the fact that the same junior-level courses were being taught every semester. Learners never progressed through a curriculum because no one with academic planning expertise had ever designed one.
“We had something like an 8% graduation rate. And it was actually remarkable that anybody was graduating, because we kept teaching the same set of classes every academic year. We never progressed.” —Enrollment management professional, Texas
At another institution, a registrar in New York described students being kept in non-matriculated status throughout their enrollment. By the time they had accumulated 58 and in some cases 92 credits, they were transferred to a different facility. No degree had been conferred. No transcript existed. No pathway forward.
“They were essentially waiting until the student had accumulated enough credits to earn an associate degree, and then they were matriculating them… a student would accumulate 58 credits and then end up getting transferred … never awarded a degree.” —Registrar, New York
These are not isolated failures. They are learning mobility failures—the exact breakdowns AACRAO works to prevent for every learner. They are more acute in the prison context because the learner has no ability to self-advocate or navigate around them.
The Operational Reality Members Are Managing
Even in well-intentioned programs, the operational conditions of correctional environments create challenges that standard training does not prepare staff for. Faculty discovered mid-semester that the software on which their courses were built does not match the application version on facility-issued tablets. A registrar in Utah described building every course from scratch after that realization by obtaining the same tablet model incarcerated learners used and installing the correct older application version so course designers could work from the learner’s actual environment.
FERPA creates a distinct layer of complexity. In facilities where mail is opened by corrections staff as standard security practice, institutions cannot reliably prevent academic information from being seen. Verbal conversations in non-private spaces may constitute violations in environments where no private space exists. A registrar in Rhode Island described students whose legal names are known only to the registrar’s office because they were incarcerated under an alias. Another described the frustration of paper FERPA release forms that consume limited mail allocation and frequently are never returned.
And when faculty push back against process integrity, asking a registrar to send transcripts to a learner who left in bad standing, or awarding grade changes for work submitted a semester late, registrars need more than their own professional judgment to hold the line.
“It’s not just your crazy registrar telling you to do this.” —Registrar, describing the value of authoritative AACRAO resources
Resources That Exist Right Now
AACRAO has been building toward this moment. This spring, we released a national PEP Memorandum of Understanding template, updated FERPA guidance specifically addressing the redisclosure questions that arise in correctional contexts, and registrar-facing implementation tools for institutions at every stage of PEP participation. These are available now on the AACRAO website.
Members who participated in interviews were consistent about what they needed beyond documents: a practitioner community. A place to bring the situation that no guidance anticipated, such as a student in a wheelchair whose elevator is broken, or a governor releasing 80 students mid-semester with no warning, and find a colleague who has faced something similar.
That community, Higher Education in Prison Practitioners, is now available in the AACRAO Exchange.
What This Means for Members
Across the interviews, the single most consistent finding was not a compliance problem and not a technology problem.
It was structural: admissions operations and registrar professionals are almost never present when Prison Education Programs are designed.
That is the gap AACRAO members are uniquely positioned to close. The competencies this work requires – transcript governance, credit applicability, FERPA compliance, SIS workflow design, cross-office coordination – are the core skills of this profession.
If you are at a PEP-serving institution or thinking about becoming one, start with the resources. Then connect with the community. The back-end is where the work begins.
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