It was September, and Rosemary Davis was feeling overwhelmed. Her son, a high school senior interested in history and music, was beginning to apply to colleges.
The admissions process had completely transformed since she was a student, and counselling at her son’s public high school in Massachusetts was “almost nonexistent,” she said.
Adrift in a new world of unfamiliar acronyms and exorbitant price tags, Ms. Davis, 48, a school librarian, turned to ChatGPT.
She began by asking the A.I. chatbot basic questions about how to fill out the Common App, a standardized application used by hundreds of U.S. colleges and universities. (For instance: What did it mean by “activity list”?) Then she requested suggestions of small liberal arts schools where her son might be competitive based on his grades and test scores.
Her son was “horrified,” she said: “He’s like, ‘Stop, Mom.’” But she wanted to know more. She copied the list of 14 colleges he was applying to into a paid chatbot, Claude Pro, and asked it to predict where he might be accepted.
“It just snowballed — I think it felt like a means of control over a process that you have no control over,” she said in January, after her son received his first acceptance to Muhlenberg College. (Decision letters began going out in December, and most students will have heard back from every school by April.) “I don’t know if it’s accurate, but it makes me feel better.”
Facing the gauntlet of college applications, students and parents are prompting A.I. chatbots to take on a role somewhere between an admissions counselor and a crystal ball. One-third of high school students surveyed in 2024 by the education consulting firm Ruffalo Noel Levitz said they had used A.I. tools in their college planning. The most popular reason they indicated was to research schools.
While some colleges have warned applicants against using generative A.I. to write their admissions essays for them, most have not articulated restrictions on using chatbots as a sounding board or a brainstorming tool — and students say they do not see asking a chatbot as all that different from consulting a parent or counselor.
A high school senior in Wisconsin applied to Purdue University at the suggestion of ChatGPT, which he had asked to compile a list of public schools with strong engineering programs. A sophomore in Connecticut regularly prompts the chatbot to estimate his chances of getting into Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
A senior at a public school in Pittsburgh asked Microsoft Copilot to trawl her message history to help her brainstorm topics for an essay question: What do you do for fun?
In interviews, students and parents described the chatbots as reassuring, constantly available, and a steal compared with private admissions consultants who can charge tens of thousands of dollars a year.
But flesh-and-blood college admissions experts worry that chatbots — which frequently offer up inaccurate information and tend to flatter their users — have the potential to mislead students during a critical period in their lives.
“The reality is, A.I. is not going to give them good advice about what it is that an admissions officer might be looking for,” said Angel Pérez, the chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counselling and a former counselor at a public high school in New York City.
A.I. tools might be helpful for gathering application deadlines or looking up the average G.P.A. of admitted students, he said, especially for families with limited access to a school counselor. But chatbots are a poor substitute for introspection.
“A computer is not going to tell you what a good fit for you is,” he said.
Is That Scholarship Even Real?
Miranda Yap was hesitant when her college admissions counselor at Punahou School, a private school in Honolulu, suggested she use ChatGPT to gather information about the colleges she was considering.
She did not want to let the chatbot think for her, she said. Still, she said she felt immense pressure to get into a competitive school and wondered whether the software could help. With a couple of keystrokes, it unfurled a spreadsheet of tuition costs and acceptance rates for more than a dozen schools she submitted.
“Great list!” the chatbot wrote in one response, after identifying Boston University as a “reach” school and the University of Oregon as a “safety.” It ended each message with an offer of more assistance: “I’d be happy to continue digging if needed!”
Ms. Yap still leaned on her school counselor for the granular details of her application, but she found herself turning to the chatbot for ideas and encouragement at all hours. “If it’s 11 p.m. and I’m working on my college spreadsheet, I’m not going to email my counselor and ask them about something: I’m going to talk to A.I.,” said Ms. Yap, 18, a senior.
Proponents argue that A.I. tools could improve access to college counselling for students who cannot turn to private coaches or family members with college degrees. There were an average of 376 students to every school counselor in the 2023-24 school year, according to the American School Counselor Association — well above the organization’s recommended ratio of 250-to-1.
College Possible, a nonprofit organization that provides free college coaching to students from low-income families, introduced an A.I. coaching service last year that it says is being used by more than 3,000 students. It answers routine questions so the organization’s human counselors can spend more time advising applicants, said Siva Kumari, College Possible’s chief executive.
“We definitely don’t believe that the whole thing can be done by A.I.,” she said.
Although several A.I.-based start-ups promise to help students boost their chances of acceptance to selective schools, a vast majority of the students who responded to a New York Times questionnaire said they had turned to the same handful of all-purpose chatbots that others use for recipes, home-repair tips, or companionship.
Brandon Royalty, a senior in Madison, Wis., said ChatGPT had been useful in suggesting large public colleges that were a fit for him academically and financially. It had been hard to schedule appointments with the four counsellors at his public high school, he said.
When he double-checked the information the chatbot had provided, he found that it was prone to hallucinate, or fabricate real-sounding responses. “There were a couple times where it would invent some scholarship that a school offered, and then I wouldn’t find any mention of that scholarship on their website,” Mr. Royalty, 18, said.
He said he knew at least one student who had asked an A.I. tool to write a draft of a college admissions essay. Mr. Royalty wrote his essay himself, he said, but he asked ChatGPT — along with a few trusted adults — for feedback on how he could make it clearer and more concise.
Doing so was not against any of the guidelines for the schools he was applying to, he said. Other students were less sure what was allowed and what was not: Some schools have adopted stances against A.I. use but still permit it for proofreading, while others offer no guidelines at all for prospective students.
By Callie Holtermann
