We built a Curriculum planner for our Master's program, was it worth it?

Higher education needs to graduate students on time. Some benefits include: decreasing the student's cost of education and more space for new students. 

To achieve this, one component includes helping students understand what their schedules might look like for the degree they are considering. Another component is giving academic staff visibility on course demand so they can plan appropriately.
Offering 30 class seats when the demand is 90 in a required course leads to delayed graduation. Providing students with an easy to use planner to map their academic career empowers them to view realistic scenarios of graduating with a specific degree. Allowing students to easily see what it takes to have an emphasis, concentration or a minor without having to meet with an undergraduate/graduate advisor. The rules for degree requirements, the prerequisites of courses, the availability of classes in a student's schedule is complicated. This is not an easy problem to solve. Our campus is about five years out from integrating a schedule planning solution. At UC Santa Barbara, Bren School of Environmental Science & Management, we developed a custom, easy to use schedule planner for our Master's Program called Myplan. Myplan allows creating multiple scenarios, trying out different emphasis, concentrations and specializations with an automated requirement check. This has enabled our Student Affairs staff to only review schedule submissions that have exceptions. Students can now easily update their planned schedule when they decide to change courses during their academic career. Empowering students to create and visualize a schedule meeting the requirements of their degree should be a requirement of our higher education institutions.