5 Things College Applicants Should Know About Using AI
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Curious about how you might use AI to help you apply to college? Here are a few things to keep in mind.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is everywhere – in voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, “smart” appliances and self-driving cars, social media influencers now partnering with major brands, and in applications crossing almost every industry.
AI chatbots including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Perplexity, Claude, and Microsoft’s Co-Pilot are becoming our everyday companions, able to answer just about any question we ask – from how to make an omelet to how to recover from a breakup to how to study for an AP exam or start a business.
Can you use ChatGPT to help you apply to college?
You may be wondering how well AI can help you with your college applications or college research. Perhaps you’ve already used AI for school assignments or to research schools. Some AI tools on the market today claim to help students with different aspects of the college application process. But like any technology, AI has limitations and college admissions professionals don’t think you should rely exclusively on AI when applying to college. Some counselors suggest using AI as a starting point – to brainstorm essay topics, to discover colleges you never heard of, or to help you prepare for a college interview.
Although AI can help you access a large amount of information about colleges, and may help you with some college application tasks, the technology isn’t yet at the point where its information is entirely accurate, consistent, or comprehensive. For now, you are better off using AI in partnership with or as a complement to reliable tools and resources, including CollegeData.
Considering accurate information from multiple sources, along with your own experiences and reactions, is going to help you make the best decisions about college.
Here are a few things to keep in mind when using AI as you search for colleges and prepare your college applications.
1. AI Is Not Always Accurate
Although the accuracy of AI tools is improving, it can still get things wrong. A 2025 review of GPT4 found it had an error rate of around 11-12%, meaning one out of every ten answers could be inaccurate.
While you can ask AI to estimate your admissions chances at different colleges, or to provide facts about different schools, the information it provides may not always be correct, and your results may differ depending on which AI tool you use. It’s therefore important to double-check the information you get from any AI chatbot with other sources, such as the schools themselves or reliable college tools.
CollegeData’s college profiles, College Search, College Chances and Admissions Tracker are resources you can trust. Here’s why:
- The college profiles feature data provided by over 2,600 colleges and universities. The data is updated annually, compiled and checked by a third-party data provider (Peterson’s) and reviewed by the CollegeData team. You’ll find the most important data about colleges all in one place – even data you might not have thought to look for.
- College Search utilizes the same fact-checked data you’ll find in the college profiles and can help you find colleges that meet your criteria with a single query. Also, with College Search, you can save your search results.
- College Chances, which provides an estimate of your chances of admission at different colleges, relies on a single, proprietary algorithm that compares your qualifications with those of freshmen recently enrolled at a college. The algorithm also considers the individual admissions factors considered by the college and how applying early decision or early action may affect your chances. Although College Chances cannot guarantee your admission to your dream school, the estimates it provides are based on data from the colleges themselves. In addition to estimating your admission chances, the tool also summarizes what you can do to improve your odds.
- Admissions Tracker can help students gauge their admission chances using data provided by real students who were admitted, waitlisted, deferred or denied at different colleges. Used together, Admissions Tracker and College Chances can help you determine whether a college is a reach, a maybe, or a good bet — and why.
2. AI Can't Write a Truly Personal College Essay
When it comes to writing, AI can produce poems, song lyrics, reports, essays, and legal arguments in an instant. The quality of this writing is getting better all the time. A study reported in The Guardian found that 94 percent of AI-written material went undetected by university graders and received higher scores than writing submitted by humans.
It’s true that AI can probably write a decent Common App essay, just not one that is likely to stand out to colleges – and certainly not an essay that represents you or does so truthfully. Experienced college essay readers can often spot AI writing – with and without AI-powered plagiarism detection tools. Will Geiger, founder of online scholarship platform Scholarship 360 told Seventeen magazine that as AI has become more widespread, he has seen “less humanity” in student essays and more instances of words that teens don’t typically use, such as “cornerstone” and “bedrock”.
He also thinks students who use AI for their college essays miss the chance to show their authentic selves to colleges. "The essay is one of the few opportunities in the admissions process for a student to communicate directly with a scholarship committee or with an admissions reader," Geiger said. "That provides a really powerful opportunity to share who you are as a person, and I don't think that an AI tool is able to do that."
Colleges are considering different ways to combat AI-generated essays, such as requiring in-person essay exams, or relying more heavily on interviews. Colleges – and even the Common Application – have also published statements prohibiting the use of AI in college applications.
3. ChatGPT Can't Replace Your College Counselor
A chatbot may be able to answer general questions about colleges or admission policies, but this isn’t the same thing as getting advice that is tailored to your specific needs from a college admission professional. Whether you’re working with a counselor at your high school or a private counselor, these professionals usually have years of experience working with students, evaluating essays, visiting colleges, talking with admission reps, and keeping up with changing college admission trends.
Many college counselors have a wealth of knowledge about different academic programs, financial aid opportunities, and admission requirements as well as a sense of what different colleges may look for in students. Similarly, the CollegeData team has been providing college information and advice to students for more than 20 years. The 300+ articles on our site are researched, written, and fact-checked by real people with years of experience covering college admissions and working with students and counselors.
It's true, however, that at many high schools, there aren’t enough counselors to go around. AI tools that provide college counseling may help solve this problem. For example, ESAI helps students uncover their unique qualities and stories and provides strategies for communicating this story to colleges. The tool recommends extracurriculars based on a student’s unique profile and offers step-by-step support for college essays – all for an annual fee of about $250.
Still, human counselors may still be better at suggesting colleges that are potentially good fits simply because they know you and have a human understanding of your college goals, your academic abilities and interests, and your unique personality.
4. AI Can't Provide a Real Student's Perspective
One of the best ways to learn about different colleges – and about applying to college – is to talk with students who have applied to and attended different schools. Tools like ChatGPT may be able to impersonate the voice of a student and may even tell realistic-sounding stories about attending a particular college, but these stories are not real.
CollegeData’s Student Stories and Stories from College, on the other hand, feature advice, opinions, and insights from real students attending colleges and universities across the country. You’ll find real stories about a wide range of college admissions experiences — including writing Common App essays, applying early decision, getting denied and waitlisted, and navigating financial aid — and what the students learned from these experiences. In Stories from College, students report back about their experiences attending college and adjusting to college life — which provides a sense of what it’s like at their school.
5. AI is NOT a Replacement for Doing Your Own College Research
Researching and applying to colleges is hard work, and AI tools may certainly help. But while these tools can be useful, remember that they don’t understand the college qualities that are important to you or how to evaluate the extent to which a college has those qualities. They also can’t tell you how a campus really looks or feels from your point of view. Chatbots can’t gauge how happy or friendly the students on campus seem or clue you in to the academic and social opportunities you’ll find exciting or enriching.
Do the work yourself
Fact-finding is only the beginning of your college application experience. Researching colleges requires several activities – looking carefully at college websites, attending college presentations, talking with current students and faculty, considering advice from parents and counselors, and visiting campuses Making wise decisions about college requires paying attention to your own personal reactions and feelings about all the information you receive and consider. AI-powered applications can’t help you evaluate colleges based on your own feelings, preferences, and needs, at least not yet.
Doing the hard work of researching colleges and writing your essays yourself is not only ethical, but it will help you identify the qualities that matter most to you and see important differences between schools. One of the keys to good decision making is basing your decisions on accurate information and your own reaction to it and asking the right questions. Doing this work will also enable you to articulate – with your own voice and from your own heart – why a college is a good fit for you and what unique things you may bring to that college.
