Many students use AI in college searches

A college search used to start with a rankings site, a campus tour, or a guidance counselor. In a February 25, 2026 survey of more than 5,000 high school students, 46 percent said they now use artificial intelligence during that search. (insidehighered.com) Most of those students are not asking a bot, “Where should I go?” and stopping there. In the same survey, 62 percent of artificial-intelligence users said they use it to find colleges that fit them, and about half use it to check application requirements or surface schools they had not already considered. (insidehighered.com) That changes the first cut of the college list. Eighteen percent of students in the EAB survey said they had removed a college because of what artificial intelligence told them, while 34 percent said their interest in a college had grown after doing that research. (insidehighered.com) Students are still cautious about trusting the machine. Only about 7 percent said a chatbot is their first stop when they want information about a specific institution, and EAB’s separate 2025 communication survey found 26 percent had used an artificial-intelligence chatbot at all during the college search. (insidehighered.com) (eab.com) Colleges are reacting by trying to show up inside those answers instead of waiting for students to click a blue link. EAB said institutions are working on “answer engine optimization,” which means rewriting web pages and facts so artificial-intelligence systems can pull cleaner, more visible answers from official college sites. (insidehighered.com) The shift has been fast. Carnegie’s 2025 survey said just 4 percent of graduating seniors reported using artificial intelligence to explore colleges in 2023, then 10 percent in 2024, and 23 percent in 2025. (carnegiehighered.com) Admissions offices are also using artificial intelligence on their side of the desk. Penn State said its LionChat bot answers frequent questions across admissions, student aid, the registrar, and bursar pages around the clock, while the University of California, Los Angeles said its BruinChat system gives real-time multilingual answers drawn from official university content. (psu.edu) (dts.ucla.edu) That frees staff for the harder conversations. Case studies from vendors serving colleges now describe chatbots automating roughly 80 percent of repetitive admissions or student-service questions, which turns counselors away from midnight deadline questions and toward financial aid, fit, and yield calls. (inovar-tech.com) (wonderchat.io) The next layer is lead scoring, which is a ranking system for which student inquiry looks most likely to turn into an applicant or enrollee. Higher-education marketing firms now describe feeding signals like repeat visits to program pages, virtual event sign-ups, and financial-aid clicks into models that sort names into hot, warm, and cold piles before a human ever picks up the phone. (level.agency) (resources.rework.com) There is a catch for colleges that want efficiency without looking fake. More than half of students in the February 2026 EAB survey said they would react negatively if a university sent correspondence that seemed to be written by artificial intelligence, so schools are learning that students will accept machine help for search and simple answers but still want a human voice when the message feels personal. (insidehighered.com)