Can AI Replace a College Counselor?

We recently hosted a webinar entitled “AI: Anticipating the Effects on School Searches and Admissions,” which touched on this topic and sparked a larger experiment.
If ChatGPT could tell me what to make for dinner based on the ingredients in my pantry, how to decorate my living room, and write a semi-convincing admissions essay, then surely it could tell me where to go to college too!

I stumbled across this blog and decided to give the methodology a try. ChatGPT responses are only as good as the prompts we input, so I needed to give it specific instructions. This prompt directed ChatGPT to impersonate an experienced college counselor by asking me questions about my preferences, with the goal of creating a list of the best colleges for me, including at least 3 “Likely,” 4 “Possible,” and 3 “Reach” options.

As I chatted with my artificial college counselor, I tried to stay true to my high-school-aged self. I grew up in a rural town about an hour outside of Baltimore, Maryland, and I was a great student (full disclosure: I don’t remember my actual SAT scores, but they were pretty good!). Like a lot of students, I participated in many extracurricular activities and was excited to go to college, though I was a bit nervous to leave my small-town bubble. Thinking back to that stage of my life, I was naive about the whole admissions process, and at the time, I could have seen myself on a variety of career paths, ranging from a concert pianist to a sound engineer, and from an actuary to a social worker. I needed quality college counseling!

If you would like to read through my entire chat, please feel free to click here.
As for the verdict, I was initially impressed with my artificial college counselor. They were conversational and validated my responses. For example, when I expressed that I felt a little lost when it came to picking a career for the rest of my life, it responded, “Got it. Flexibility and the ability to explore different fields will be key.”

At first glance, the college recommendations seemed solid. They were all reputable, big-name schools. In real life, nearly 20 years ago, I had shortlisted a few of the options ChatGPT had mentioned; many of my peers in high school had attended colleges on the list; and I had even considered two for graduate school later on. I also appreciated how ChatGPT’s reasoning behind its recommendations and its suggestions for further research were spot-on, especially considering my earlier concerns about picking a program of study and my nervousness about moving from a small, rural high school to a potentially large and overwhelming campus.

However, as I mentioned earlier, ChatGPT responses are only as good as the prompts we input. My artificial college counselor only asked me about country, regional preference, affordability, major/programs, campus, size, and campus diversity because I had told it to. While these are all valid considerations for a college search, there are probably other factors I should have considered, that an average high schooler might not have even known to consider. In a sense, “You don’t know what you don’t know!” I am skeptical that the average high schooler, at the very start of their college search, would know what specific prompts to include without a bit more guidance first.

By contrast, an experienced human counselor might have first asked me about my prior knowledge and if I was interested in any specific colleges or if I had already done any research. In real life, I had visited my older cousin in college a few times and had completed a “Women in STEM” coding weekend at a university in Baltimore. I was very interested in both colleges already, and I didn’t come into the college search process blind.

A human counselor might have asked me about other aspects of college, such as reputation (I did not want a “party school”), religious and political leanings, work-study programs, my specific extracurricular interests, prevalence of Greek life, weather (I hate snow!), and more.
They might have also asked for clarification on my more indecisive answers. For example, I had mentioned that I might be a little nervous about going to college in a city where I’d have to take public transportation to get from class to class. If pressed, my little high school self would have admitted that I’d be terrified to take the subway by myself, which would have easily removed my recommendation, Temple University, from consideration! (As an aside, I now consider myself a Broad Street Line expert after working in Philadelphia for 10 years, but I would have never predicted that as a high schooler).

A human college counselor might have read “between the lines” and provided me with a bit more information on how the FAFSA works, and steps I could take before graduating high school to explore different programs of study. Their experience with college admissions could have helped identify pieces of our conversation that might bolster my college essays at a later point in the process.

I also can’t discount the value of any real-life connections a human college counselor might facilitate. Perhaps it would have been helpful to hear about another student they worked with who also moved from a rural, small town to a sizable college campus. Maybe a human college counselor knew of other students grappling with their program of study, or maybe they could arrange a group trip to visit some local options.

Ultimately, while ChatGPT seemed to provide me with some solid recommendations as starting points for my college search, and while I could have endlessly refined and re-refined my initial prompt to include other factors for consideration, it also seemed to be missing key pieces only discernible through human experience and intuition. Based on this experiment, it’s my opinion that at such a vulnerable, pivotal stage of life, students would benefit far more from an experienced, perceptive, and connected human college counselor than an artificial one.

And as for my real-life college choice all those years ago, where I took art and physics classes at the same time, changed majors once, made lifelong friends, worked odd jobs on campus to offset my tuition, played intermural ultimate frisbee and bowling in my spare time, and graduated with well-rounded skills that eventually landed me here at Bennett…

It wasn’t on ChatGPT’s list.

Please visit Bennet College Consulting to find out more about our college services.

So, can AI replace a college counselor?

Not yet, and the reason is more interesting than a simple no. What the experiment above showed is that AI is genuinely useful at some parts of a college search and unreliable at others, and the difference matters enormously when a student only gets one shot at an application cycle.

What AI does well

It is quick at breadth. Ask it for colleges with a particular major in a particular region and it will produce a long list in seconds, which is a reasonable place to begin. It can summarize what a course involves, explain unfamiliar admissions vocabulary, and help a student who is staring at a blank page find a first sentence.

It is also available at eleven at night, which is when a lot of application anxiety actually happens.

Where it falls short

It does not know the student. It knows what has been typed into it, which is rarely the thing that matters most: how a young person actually works, what they are like in a classroom, where they have grown, what a family can realistically afford, and which environments they would quietly struggle in.

It can also be confidently wrong. Admissions requirements, deadlines, and testing policies change year to year, and a model can state an outdated requirement as fact. In a college search, a plausible-sounding error can cost a student an application.

And it has no relationships. It has never visited the campus, cannot ring an admissions office, and cannot advocate for a particular student when advocacy is what is needed.

The useful way to think about it

AI handles information. A counselor brings judgment. Using it to widen an initial list or to explain a term is sensible. Using it to decide where a student should apply, or to write in their voice, is where it stops serving the student.

How a Bennett consultant helps

Our college consulting team works with students individually, and with the employers supporting relocating families whose children are applying from outside the US. We know the schools, we check what has changed this year, and we know when a list needs challenging.

Get in touch with a college consultant who knows this year’s rules, for an hour of clarity →

Bennett International Education Consultancy works directly with hundreds of families each year across the globe. We support families by helping them make informed decisions about the best-fit schools for their children; with our guidance, they secure placement in preschools, private day schools, public/state schools, boarding schools, colleges & universities, including schools with particular programs, such as special needs support.