How Prospective Students’ AI Use Is Shifting College Enrollment: A High School Counselor’s Observations
The half-empty mug of lukewarm pumpkin spice latte had been on my desk for two hours when Lila leaned forward, tapping her phone screen toward me. “See? ChatGPT says this program has a 92% job placement rate within six months of graduation, so that’s why I’m applying here instead of the private college we looked at last month.” Lila’s a senior, aiming for early childhood education, and this wasn’t the first time this semester I’d had a conversation exactly like this. For 12 years I’ve been a guidance counselor at our suburban Ohio public high school, and this application cycle is unlike any I’ve seen.
Three weeks after my meeting with Lila, I got a call from Mark, the admissions director at our local regional public university, Western State. He was half confused, half giddy, saying his early action applications were up 18% year over year, after three straight years of declining enrollments. His team had run a survey of the first 200 applicants to figure out what they’d done differently with marketing, and the answer surprised him: 68% of respondents said they first learned Western State’s job placement and tuition numbers from ChatGPT or Google AI Overview, not from his team’s social media, college fair visits, or viewbooks.
Later that month, I sat across from Clara, an admissions rep for a small private liberal arts college an hour and a half away, at our regional admissions meeting. She pulled out her tablet to show me her numbers: first-year applications were down 22% this cycle. “We had a student from a school just north of you tell his counselor AI said our average in-state student graduates with $38,000 in debt,” she told me, stirring her iced tea. “Our actual average for incoming freshmen this year with merit aid is $22,000—less than a lot of publics. But no one bothered to check our website to correct the number before crossing us off the list.”
It’s clear now that AI use by prospective students isn’t just changing how essays get written. It’s shifting enrollment numbers across every type of institution, and most of the change is driven by how students build their initial college lists. Three years ago, most students would walk into my office with a rough list pulled from our school’s college planning tool, their parents’ alma maters, or schools they’d heard about at college fairs. This year, more than half of the students I see come in with a full, sorted list generated by AI, built from their input of major, desired location, and budget. The lists are almost always skewed toward large, public institutions with easily aggregated, positive data that AI can pull quickly. Smaller schools, private schools, or schools with niche programs that don’t have easily searchable institution-wide stats get left off almost automatically.
What I didn’t expect was how often those AI numbers are wrong, or at least outdated. A few weeks back, Javi, a junior starting his list early, came in convinced he should cross the private Ohio Institute of Technology off his list because AI said their mechanical engineering program only had a 70% job placement rate. When we pulled up the program’s most recent outcomes report, the actual placement rate for 2023 graduates was
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