Students are using AI in college search. Counselors may not see it happening.

I recently got the chance to chat with the Appily Counselor Advisory Board, a small group of experienced high school counselors who regularly share their perspective on the world of college counseling and how resources like Appily.com can best support college-bound students. 

My hope was to get feedback on our recent research into how students are using AI in college search. What I learned was something even more interesting: a glimpse into a divide between how students are navigating the college search process today and what the adults supporting them are seeing.

Student AI use is not always visible to counselors

In our most recent survey on AI in college search, from November 2025, 46% of college-bound high school students reported using AI as a resource when exploring colleges. 

When I shared that statistic with the group, most of the participants said this wasn’t consistent with what they were seeing in their day-to-day interactions with students. They weren’t observing the AI conversations, nor, for the most part, were they being asked to weigh in on AI-generated college lists or application guidance.

The dissonance suggests that a substantial portion of AI-assisted college searching is happening outside the existing “official” counselor infrastructure. Students aren’t necessarily telling their counselors, “I asked ChatGPT about this.”They’re just doing it, and then showing up to counseling appointments with AI-sourced impressions (or, in some cases, misinformation).

AI gives students more access, but not without risks

Counselors expressed mixed feelings about how AI is manifesting in college search.

On one side were counselors who saw genuine opportunity in the rise of AI-assisted college search. High-quality, sophisticated college guidance has historically been unevenly distributed. Students with access to well-resourced school counseling departments, private college counselors, or college-educated parents have always had an advantage. If AI can give a first-generation student in a rural district access to the kind of college search support that was previously available only to the privileged few, that’s an equalizer more than a threat.

On the other side, counselors were alarmed by some of the use cases we learned about from EAB’s AI survey. 

One source of concern was the students who reported they were using AI to manage application requirements and deadlines. That sounds it could be a helpful way to use AI to manage the complexities of the college application process…unless, of course, the results are inaccurately sourced or hallucinated altogether. 

As one counselor pointed out, a student who misses an application deadline because an AI tool gave them the wrong date, or who applies under the wrong requirements because they trusted a chatbot, faces real consequences, and it’s not clear who to blame when something goes wrong. 

Counselors can help students use AI more thoughtfully

The advisory board also surfaced a debate about how counselors themselves should respond to the ubiquity of AI among their students—and again, the room split.

Some counselors were pragmatic about it, reasoning that AI is a fact of modern life, and students are going to use it; it is better to accept it and figure out how to work alongside it.

Others argued that part of the counselor’s job is to help students become critical consumers of the tools and sources they’re using. Teaching students to use AI thoughtfully, to verify what it tells them, and to understand its limitations is a core contribution counselors can make.

A caution on population-specific observations

One more issue emerged from the discussion that I want to flag for anyone who works with data in this space, including our teams here at EAB. Several counselors raised a concern about how cross-tabulations of AI usage data across student sub-populations can be misapplied. 

If you observe that certain groups of students are using, or trusting, AI more or less than others, there’s a risk that finding gets taken out of context and potentially used to reinforce assumptions about students rather than to serve them better.

This is fair warning, and a discipline worth building into how we present and discuss this research going forward.

What this guidance gap means for enrollment leaders

Overall, the picture that emerged from my conversation with the Counselor Advisory Board is one of a rapidly evolving information environment in which students are more autonomous—and more reliant on AI—than the adults around them realize. 

To play that forward, that means enrollment teams are operating in a context where:

• Students are forming impressions of your institution through AI tools before you have any direct contact with them
• The high school counselors you partner with may not be aware of the role AI is already playing in their students’ process, and therefore they’re not able to support them in using AI effectively and responsibly
• The quality of AI-generated information about your institution—hard information like deadlines, requirements, outcomes, as well as more subjective information like campus environment and fit—matters more than it ever has before

For many months now, we’ve been sounding the alarm that enrollment teams need to focus on how to show up accurately and credibly in an AI-mediated college search environment. This conversation with the Appily group reinforces that the urgency is real, and we need to do more to foster our understanding and our strategic preparedness.

That’s why we have increased our focus on primary research into student AI use. We’re releasing a new iteration of our AI student survey shortly, with updated findings on how college-bound students are using AI in their search—stay tuned. 

Michael Koppenheffer

Vice President, Enroll360 Marketing, Analytics and AI Strategy

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