BROOKLYN, N.Y. — At 16, Khloe Watson-Barrett already knows she wants to be a lawyer. She also knows she’ll soon have to run the gauntlet of the high-stakes college admissions process, now that she’s past the halfway point of her junior year in high school.
“It’s nerve-wracking,” Watson-Barrett said of what she’s heard about applying to college.
That unease is only aggravated for many high school students by a lack of access to one-on-one time with overburdened college counselors, who are often buried under questions about what tests to take, which deadlines to meet and how to fill out applications for financial aid.
Now Watson-Barrett’s school and many others are just at the start of testing a whole new generation of technology that promises to free up time for college counselors while giving students crucial information, even outside school hours: artificial intelligence built specifically to provide advice about life after high school.
The AI being piloted for use in high school college counseling doesn’t simply skim the internet like general-purpose AI, which is subject to misinformation and manipulation. It’s programmed with answers provided by experts, based on a history of previous applicants’ questions.
This includes real-time data about something that’s critical to consumers but that many high school college counselors can’t answer: what jobs are in demand, how much they pay and how much it will cost to get the credentials they require.
College counselors still are best at understanding and suggesting how students can achieve their individual ambitions, said Diana Moldovan, director of college and career placement at the public Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, where Watson-Barrett goes. “You can’t replace the trust,” Moldovan said.
But counselors get bogged down answering procedural questions or prodding students to complete tasks, she said. “If AI could do some of these things, that leaves more time” to talk with soon-to-be graduates about their academic, social and financial choices.
Unlike in many fields, she and others said, the AI being expressly designed for college counseling — including a new AI platform called CounselorGPT that her school is to begin testing next year — has the goal of encouraging more human interaction, not less.
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Moldovan’s office, hung with the banners of colleges and universities, is often busy, though the school has only about 200 juniors and seniors, or fewer than 70 for each of the three college advisers — a much smaller-than-typical number.
Even these counselors are frustrated by having to spend time on things AI could do, such as helping students fill out financial aid forms and reminding them to write their application essays. And that’s with caseloads much smaller than the national ratio of students to counselors, according to the American School Counseling Association: 372:1.
Those ratios are falling incrementally. But they’re still high, and even worse in some states. High school college counselors in Arizona are responsible for 570 students apiece; in Michigan, 565; in Minnesota, 539; and in California, 432. Nearly one in five high schools have no college counselors at all.
College counselors in schools that do have them are responsible for so many other tasks that only about a fifth of their time is spent directly on college admissions advising, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, or NACAC, estimates. And they’re available only during school days and hours — and not on weekends, holidays or in the summers.
These are longstanding problems purpose-built AI could help solve, said Angel Pérez, NACAC’s CEO.
“As the technology grows and gets stronger, counselors can outsource the basic information that students need and focus on the human aspects of these young people,” Pérez said.
Nearly half of students are already using AI on their own to navigate the complex process of applying to college, according to a survey released in February by the higher education consulting firm EAB. That includes helping them pick and compare schools, complete their applications and prepare for standardized tests.
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This alarms college counseling professionals. Most generative AI that families are using can’t detect misinformation or disinformation, they say, and is vulnerable to recruiters who use tricks to put certain universities and colleges at the top of search results.
“I would not want a young person to be using these tools by themselves, because it’s about asking the right questions,” said Pérez. “Ask [generative] AI what college you’re going to get into — you’re not going to get the right answers. There still has to be the human component.”
For busy and sometimes inaccessible college counselors to compete with always available, touch-of-a-key AI, however, they need focused AI already loaded up with right answers and objective information from admissions experts, he and others said.
“It should be able to give the information [counselors] would normally give to students — how to take the SAT and fill out the FAFSA,” Pérez said, using the acronym for the free application for federal student aid. “All of that can be given to students at the press of a button, so college counselors can talk about fit and match and the unique aspects of the individual student.”
As with much about AI, this potential hasn’t yet been realized at significant scale. Several different and competing versions of it are in their early or experimental stages.
One is CounselorGPT, which has been in testing this year in 13 of the 22 public high schools operated in New York City by the nonprofit Urban Assembly. Developed by and proprietary to Urban Assembly, it uses real-time job postings analyzed by the labor market data company Lightcast to show what jobs are in demand, how much they pay, what credentials they require and how much it will cost to get those skills.
That’s information high school college counselors haven’t historically been able to provide but that consumers want, said David Adams, CEO of Urban Assembly, whose schools are expressly focused on preparing students for the workforce.
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“Even when students have access to the highest-quality college counselors, they can’t possibly know all the information around labor markets,” said Adams. “Students are left guessing about what kind of degree leads to social and economic mobility.”
They often make the wrong decisions, he said. “They shouldn’t have to go through college and struggle to get a job before they realize the low return on that credential.”
Another AI platform, called the Expert Virtual Assistant, or EVA, is being developed by a private company, the College Guidance Network, with which NACAC has a partnership.
It uses AI as a starting point that, in response to questions, not only provides basic answers, but takes users to videos and other resources about applying to college.
Jon Carson, CEO of the College Guidance Network, said he co-founded the company when his own son, then in high school in the affluent Boston suburb where they live, got only an hour a year with his college counselor, who had myriad other responsibilities, including dealing with students’ non-college-application-related problems.
“I was stunned,” said Carson. “That’s the quantity problem. Then we get to the quality problem, which is that the average counselor also has to be a social worker.”
AI can’t substitute for human college counselors, he said, but it can offer basic information, at any time. EVA also records what questions students ask it, so counselors can track them. Carson compares it to the time-saving form that patients fill out before they see a doctor.
“What you’re trying to leverage here is that one hour that the counselor does have,” Carson said. “And they don’t have to use it answering the simplest questions.”
Twenty high schools are testing EVA, he said. “It puts the ball in the students’ courts in terms of doing the groundwork,” said Mike Penney, college and career counselor at one of them, the Abby Kelley Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, Massachusetts. “Then, when I meet with them, we can have a better conversation about next steps and where to go from there.”
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Not all college counselors embrace this idea. Though many are willing to use AI to streamline their own duties, fewer than 40 percent see it as a way to provide services directly to students, according to a survey by the American School Counselor Association and researchers at Ball State University.
“It’s still in the very early stages and I’m seeing a little hesitation,” said Pérez. He said some counselors worry that AI might replace them altogether, or be used as an excuse for raising student-to-counselor ratios even higher.
“I don’t think that’s just college counselors,” Pérez said about such fears. “I think that’s all of us.”
There’s another group that’s skeptical: students who have benefited from personal interaction with their college counselors.
AI is just another of the layers of technology that are being pushed on these students, Penney noted. “The hardest thing is getting them to use the tools available. They’ve never had so many, and it can be overwhelming,” he said.
On the other hand, there are fears that students can become attached to and overly reliant on AI. EVA originally was given a female icon and pronouns to go with its female name, but is being changed to an owl to avoid users sentimentalizing it.
Jaheem Shaw, a senior at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice, is deciding from among several universities that accepted him, with his counselors’ help. Like junior Khloe Watson-Barrett, he used the term “nerve-wracking” to describe the process.
But his college advisers “get to know you as a person, your interests, where you want to go,” said Shaw. “There’s a lot of value in asking someone who has experience in the process, on a more personal level.”
Those advisers also gave him something else, he said: encouragement.
“And I don’t think that’s something you can get from AI,” Shaw said.
Contact writer Jon Marcus at 212-678-7556, jmarcus@hechingerreport.org or jpm.82 on Signal.
This story about AI in college counseling was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for our higher education newsletter.
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