While most K-12 schools have counselors available, some students don’t receive dedicated college counseling from human beings. Counselors have high caseloads, serving an average of 372 students per counselor — well above the American School Counselor Association’s recommendation of 250.
Additionally, according to a 2023 report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC), public school counselors on average spend 22 percent of their time helping with postsecondary planning, while private school counselors spend half their time on it. Receiving one-on-one counseling increases a student’s likelihood of submitting a Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and ultimately attending college, according to NACAC.
Now, students are seeking out chatbots for personalized assistance instead.
“We’re now going to be living in a world where things are very tailored to the individual person,” said Ben Samara, a former counselor with two decades of experience and founder of the education consulting firm Samara Solutions Group. “I’m finding that that’s happening in the college process, too.”
CHATBOT VS COUNSELOR
In a 2025 survey of 5,000 high school students from the research and consulting firm EAB, 46 percent reported using AI in their college search — a sharp increase from 26 percent earlier the same year.
Students will “share their stats,” including GPA, standardized test scores and academic interests, and use chatbots to find schools that match them, Samara said. Some will give a chatbot a list of schools they are already interested in applying to, then ask it to track down similar institutions or programs. Some will ask a chatbot to aggregate data from a school’s Reddit thread and describe the student experience.
“[I asked ChatGPT to] look at comments/chats from students enrolled there and describe the vibe,” one student said in the free-response section of the EAB survey.
Students take AI suggestions seriously. About a third said they discovered a school they hadn’t considered previously, and 18 percent said they removed a school from consideration due to AI results.
In addition to brainstorming which colleges to apply to, some students use it to track deadlines and application requirements. A quarter of students said they have an ongoing conversation with AI about their college search process.
“It’s less web search, less searching in books, and more using AI as that one-stop shop to launch the search process,” Samara said. “Almost a personal assistant.”
Some AI-driven tools have emerged explicitly to serve as assistants in this process. Appily, for example, is part of EAB and allows students to search for colleges by location, SAT score, admission criteria and other factors. It also offers tools like an acceptance calculator and major quiz. Other similar programs, like Kollegio, take it a step further with help on student essays and faculty recommendation letters.
This rise in chatbot use by students aligns with a recorded decrease in desire for parental guidance. In 2021, when parents were particularly involved in their students’ education due to the COVID-19 pandemic, 73 percent of students reported consulting their parents for college information, according to the EAB survey. In 2025, that dropped to 66 percent.
Michael Koppenheffer, a vice president for analytics and AI strategy at EAB who worked on the report, said students sometimes appreciate the anonymity of a chatbot.
“You feel like you’re not being judged,” he said.
THE UNDERLYING AI LAYER
Koppenheffer said there is another way AI is shaping students’ college search. According to EAB’s report, 26 percent of students said search engines were their first point of contact for college research, while 7 percent answered AI for the same question. However, Google searches have gotten less useful, as nearly 60 percent of them now end without users clicking on any of the results, according to research in 2024.
“What that means is that students might not be thinking that they’re using AI to get information, but most of the time they actually are, because Google is acting more like an AI query, an AI prompt, than it’s acting like a search engine,” Koppenheffer said. “It’s synthesizing information and presenting it in that first results page.”
EAB found online resources like college websites and college search sites were still the most common first point of contact (40 percent), but AI is changing how these sites work, as well.
Many college websites have AI-driven plugins, with aggregate search tools like CollegeBoard’s Big Future using AI to connect disparate data sets, even though students don’t perceive them as AI to the same degree as chatbot communications, Koppenheffer said.
Even so, he said students do tend to be skeptical about AI and recognize the importance of verifying information it provides. When EAB asked students how they felt about using AI, “skeptical” was the most common response at 37 percent, beating out “curious” and “concerned.”
“The challenge is that students are not aware of how ubiquitous AI is in our lives,” Koppenheffer said. “I think the most important literacy gap is actually understanding how pervasive AI is, and that same informed skepticism that you should bring to a conversation you have with AI actually belongs in many more areas of your digital life than you realize.”
