AI is revolutionizing how families approach the college admissions process — and not just by writing application essays.
A new survey from education research firm EAB found that the percentage of high school kids using AI in their college process jumped from 26% to 46% just between this spring and the prior one.
And parents are using AI at even higher rates than students, according to the EAB data. A staggering 57% of parents surveyed employed the technology to help direct the application process.
But an expert warns that mother — and LLMs — don’t always know best.
“Without even their kids knowing … parents are asking ChatGPT or Claude to act like an all-knowing predictor, like, ‘Give me my child’s chances of getting into this school with this GPA, this ethnicity, these extracurriculars and test scores,’” Chris Rim, CEO and founder of college admissions consultancy Command Education, told The Post. But, “Admissions is more of an art than a science.”
Over the past few years, he said that parents are showing up to appointments with him with fully formed strategies that all sound the same. For instance, AI will almost always tell the parents of kids interested in engineering to join the robotics club — pretty clichéd advice in Rim’s opinion.
“I can now tell when parents have used LLMs to prepare for a call with me, because they’re saying exactly the same thing in the same order,” he said. “That only started happening three or four years ago.”
The biggest trap families can fall into is relying on AI guidance that makes their applicant sound less unique.
“AI can really flatten the entire profile,” Rim warned. “It’s not necessarily bad advice, but everyone is going to get it, and you want to stand out in the process.”
This can be especially true when it’s employed early in high school.
“Families will use ChatGPT or LLMs to find the right programs to apply to and to map out the entire four years of high school,” Rim said. “[AI is] not just putting the final touches on a college application, but actually directing a child’s high school career from the beginning.”
Still, AI can be quite helpful when used judiciously.
Rim says he often hears that students stumbled on the perfect program or even opened their minds to an unexpected school because AI pointed out an alignment with their interests.
One Reddit user, a parent of a current student, reported that they used AI to “come up with an overall application narrative based on a bunch of random thoughts and activities” and also for research before and after college visits.
For example, they would tell AI, “She liked X about Michigan but didn’t like Y at UVA [or she] liked the campus at Columbia more than NYU” and then “used that to hone in” on better fits
Rim also suspects that more and more schools are using AI to tackle admissions.
In recent years, colleges have worked to increase the number of applicants without expanding class size, which can make the school seem more selective by deflating its acceptance rate. At NYU, for instance, the number of applicants has doubled since 2015 while its admissions rate declined by 75%.
But admissions staff aren’t growing in proportion with the number of applicants, leading Rim to believe that admissions committees must be leaning on AI more. “It’s not like they are growing their admissions staff by five times,” he noted.
Some schools have admitted to using AI. Virginia Tech shifted from two human readers per application essay to one human and one AI evaluation in the 2025 admissions cycle. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also says that it uses AI to produce “data points” about application essays and transcripts.
For students navigating the college application process, with or without AI, Rim’s advice is simple: “It’s less about optimizing variables and more about telling a story only you can tell.”
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