Colleges Are Using AI in Admissions Decisions: Should You Be Concerned?

This article explores how artificial intelligence is shaping college admissions, clarifying misconceptions and providing insight into what the growing role of AI means for students and parents.

Table of Contents

• Colleges Are Using AI in Admissions Decisions: Should You Be Concerned?
• Survey: Eight in Ten Colleges Using AI in Admissions
• Less Selective Colleges May Use a Formulaic Approach
• Selective College Admissions Is Different
• AI Already Evaluates Transcripts
• AI May Play a Role in Essay Evaluation
• What Does This Mean for College Applicants?

Artificial intelligence has already begun to reshape many fields, from healthcare to finance and everything in between. It’s little surprise, therefore, that AI has made its way into the realm of higher education, particularly college admissions processes.

Headlines have suggested that colleges are already using AI to make admissions decisions, but just how big is this shift—and should parents of college-bound students be worried?

Survey: Eight in Ten Colleges Using AI in Admissions

A survey by Inside Higher Ed in September 2023 reported that eight in ten colleges could use AI in admissions for the 2024 admission cycle, a surprising headline given the widespread skepticism regarding AI.

The survey itself sparked questions, with University of Georgia Vice Provost for Enrollment Management Andy Borst writing, “There is a zero percent chance admissions offices are using AI to read files in the way this internet survey and article imply.”

Even if we take the survey results at face value, the question remains: just how are colleges using AI in their admission processes?

Less Selective Colleges May Use a Formulaic Approach

Georgia Tech’s Rick Clark, Executive Director of Strategic Student Access, offers one explanation for the surprising survey results, noting that “it’d be interesting to know more about…what the admit rates and selectivity of certain schools were because…the average admit rate for four year schools is 65% to 67%…meaning [that] a lot of schools are making formulaic decisions.”

The selective colleges that so many students target—the brand name schools commonly featured in college rankings—are not representative of the college landscape as a whole. Of the thousands of colleges across the country, most admit the majority of applicants. The admissions decisions at these schools are based primarily on applicants meeting a base level of requirements: minimum degree requirements, grade requirements, test score requirements, or a combination of the three. Such decisions can efficiently be made by a computer program, which is where AI enters the picture.

Selective College Admissions Is Different

At selective colleges, there are many more factors that go into admission decisions, both academic (grades, course rigor, test scores, etc.) and personal (extracurricular involvement, recommendation letters, essays, etc.). Given that such schools tout their holistic admissions processes, it becomes more worrisome to imagine the ways that AI could interfere with what we’d like to believe is a human-oriented system.

Among selective schools using AI in admissions, the tool is leveraged to further streamline efficiency processes that have already been in place for decades.

AI Already Evaluates Transcripts

When selective colleges evaluate applicants’ transcripts, they aren’t simply looking at the GPA listed. They’re also evaluating a student’s course rigor in a way that reflects the school’s mission. Some colleges give added weight to rigorous courses like AP or IB courses; others may weight grades for elective courses differently; still others may weight courses from 9th grade differently than courses from 11th grade.

In a typical AI-free admissions cycle, colleges will outsource much of this administrative work to temps who are then trained on the school’s particular transcript evaluation rubrics and formulae. This is the kind of administrative work that can easily be handled by the right computer system. Enter: AI.

The decision to leverage AI in this way is really just the next logical step in existing efficiency practices. “Many large public flagships and certainly selective privates were already well down a path that just wasn’t being called AI,” says Don Hossler, Senior Scholar at USC Rossier’s Center for Enrollment Research, Policy, and Practice. “They were building in algorithms that help them screen students.”

Phil Komarny, Chief Innovation Officer at Maryville University, explains his school’s decision to rely on AI this way: “I believe in giving machines inhumane work and giving humans really humane work to do. So parsing through a transcript…to get a grade to put into our information system takes at least 10 to 12 minutes…for an admissions counselor. We’ve got that down to seconds, because all the manual processing, that ingestion, classifications have been done by a model. It even exports it into a spreadsheet that [the admissions team] is used to seeing.”

AI May Play a Role in Essay Evaluation

Colleges are less forthcoming about whether and how AI might play a role in evaluating admissions essays, a naturally more subjective aspect of college applications. A look at the University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill’s practices offers insight into what this could look like.

UNC Chapel Hill began leveraging AI tools to evaluate essays several years ago. The computer-generated essay score reflects the quality of word choice, sentence structure, sentence variability, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, length, and so on. Guidelines given to human application readers explain that the essay score offers an idea of the writing quality but specify that reading the entirety of the essay provides “a more accurate sense of a student’s writing abilities.”

In other words, at UNC Chapel Hill, AI may suggest whether an essay was well-written, but it’s not evaluating the personal qualities conveyed in the essay.

What Does This Mean for College Applicants?

Despite sensational headlines about AI deciding who gets into college, the role of AI in admissions is more nuanced. Ultimately, AI is a tool that is making admissions more efficient but not—at least not so far—less human. For students, the guidelines for what makes a strong application remain the same:

• Grades, course rigor, and test scores remain key—especially as AI makes it easier to sift out students based on these metrics.
• Essays remain important—few (if any) selective schools are relying on AI to evaluate essays without human oversight.