As teenagers decide whether to go to college, and where, more of them are turning to artificial intelligence to help make that decision. According to a survey out today from the education company EAB, about half of high schoolers who are planning to go to college are using AI tools in that search. That’s nearly double the number from last spring. 

For Jennifer Jessie, a college consultant in the D.C. area, that tracks.

“A student's using AI almost all the time, for almost anything,” she said. So, it makes sense that students will ask an AI to find colleges with particular attributes. 

“They usually say, ‘Okay, I want a school that has this particular engineering program. I want a good football team,’” Jessie said. And then, the AI will spit out a list of colleges. 

Michael Koppenheffer, a co-author on that EAB study, said high schoolers are also asking very targeted questions. 

“We had a number of students who did things like ‘Hey, ChatGPT, I'm interested in this college. Can you go on Reddit and Instagram and tell me what the vibe on campus is like?’”

Koppenheffer said students are also using the tools to help make a decision about where to go: tossing in the schools they’ve gotten into, the scholarships they’ve gotten, and asking the AI to pro-con everything for them. He said kids are turning to this tech because it makes the whole exhausting college search experience easier. 

“Many of us have been through this process in our life. You know it is difficult to manage,” he said. “It's a lot to think about and assimilate, and AI is great at making information collection analysis easier.”

Koppenheffer said colleges have to pay attention to how they appear in these AI responses. It’s like SEO, but instead of getting noticed by a search engine, they have to get noticed by an AI.

“The first thing colleges need to do is be secret shoppers themselves. They need to look on AI and see what AI is saying about them,” he said. 

Colleges also have to work on their digital presence, making sure everything about the school is up to date and accurate. Otherwise, the AIs could surface old information.

“It's a lot of work, and it really is never going to end,” said Koppenheffer.

It can also be expensive. At Indiana Wesleyan University, a private college in central Indiana, the school is spending about half a million dollars annually on its AI influencing efforts, according to Nick Swisher, the school’s vice president for brand and marketing. That’s about 10% of the college’s marketing budget. 

“Marketing is becoming really all about feeding signals into the AI ecosystem so that your brand is discoverable,” said Swisher.

As part of this, Indiana Wesleyan University has added a lot of FAQs to its website to answer questions a prospective college student might have. For example — “What do I do with this degree? Where are recent graduates now?”

Swisher said it’s all part of helping to answer the questions that the AIs are getting.

“If you think about it, really, what's happening is we're moving beyond the three-word search term,” said Swisher. “It's no longer just ‘cheap colleges near me.’ It's now conversational.” 

The tech is changing so quickly, it can be hard for colleges to keep up.

“It's an ever-evolving landscape, and it kind of feels like you're swimming upstream,” said Stephanie Catlett, creative director at the Tippie College of Business at the University of Iowa, which is also investing in AI search. 

But Catlett said she knows her school needs to be thinking about AI, in order to be part of the conversation.

“It’s Marketing 101. Where are your customers? Go meet them there,” Catlett said. “Our prospective students are there. So we want to be there as much as possible and meet them where they are. So they start to say, ‘Hey, I recognize you. You're the Tippie College of Business.’”

It’s not just teenagers who are using AI in the college search, but parents and counselors, as well. For college consultant Jennifer Jessie, it’s now part of her process.

“I try to turn to humans, but humans are not always accessible, and AI is,” she said.

Jessie said she’ll turn to humans after she consults an AI, to make sure it’s a valid suggestion. But she said one thing that’s frustrating is AI will sometimes surface the same colleges over and over again.

“So I have to be very direct with my AI, that I don't want just colleges on U.S. News and World Report, or some of the rankers. I want colleges that maybe other people aren't finding.”

Jessie wants AI to be good at surfacing those hidden gems. That way it can really help students find schools that are the best fit for them.