Episode 95: Artificial Intelligence in College Admissions

Transcript

• Transcript

  [INTRODUCTION]

  [0:00:07] BHA: If there's one thing that's always constant, it's change. Nowhere is that more true than in the field of technology.

  [0:00:13] BT: Like many industries, higher education is transforming in the midst of the newest tech revolution: artificial intelligence. But what does that mean? Where exactly can you expect to see AI in the college process? I'm Brooke Thames from Bucknell University.

  [0:00:29] BHA: And I'm Becca Haupt Aldredge, also from Bucknell. In this episode of College Admissions Insider, we'll explore some of the ways that colleges are implementing AI assistance, how that impacts the experience of students and families, and what it means for the future of higher education.

  [0:00:45] BT: Our guest is Emily Smith, Principal Vice President of Partner Success at CollegeVine, a company that helps colleges and universities optimize their operations with AI.

  [INTERVIEW]

  [0:00:55] BHA: Welcome to the podcast.

  [0:00:56] ES: Thanks so much for having me on. I'm very excited to be here with you guys.

  [0:01:00] BT: Yeah, we're excited to have you. For our listeners, let's start with an introduction to your work with CollegeVine, which is one of the organizations that's at the forefront of introducing AI into the college process right now.

  [0:01:11] ES: Yeah, for sure. It's such an interesting time with AI, because a lot of vendors in the higher ed space, students, IECs, we're all talking about AI as if it's this monolith, right? We're talking about it like, "Do you use AI?" That's saying, at this point, "Do you use the Internet? Do you use any technology?" It's not a monolith, and we're really at some exciting places now with AI, whether it's students' use of AI in the college process, or high schools and the ways in which we can counsel students and get students into higher education.

  Also on the higher ed side, it's a really exciting time, because we're talking about not only generative AI, and we're not only talking about the ways in which AI can create new things for us, but we're now talking about agentic AI. We're talking about agentic AI in so far as hiring as if we're hiring an AI agent, or hiring a team member into whether it's an enrollment team at a college, or any operational team, to do work. We think about AI agents really showing up in the college process in a really, really exciting way. CollegeVine is actually a platform for deploying AI agents, really, across the entire surface area of the college operating system. And the ways in which we deploy AI agents in the enrollment space are really as if we're like hiring team members or employees that get trained up on an institution like Bucknell and get then plugged into different areas on campus — whether it's working alongside department staff to automate campus workflows, or enhancing staff bandwidth to make things better for students.

  Our most important organizing principle is really around improving and removing friction from the student experience. When we're talking about deploying AI agents, we're talking about the ways in which we can make things way better and smoother for students, wherever we're meeting them, whether it's in the enrollment process, or once you get enrolled in college, the ways in which AI agents can really assist in your experience as an enrolled student. Yeah, here at CollegeVine, we deploy AI agents across that entire surface area of campus ops and work with a ton of enrollment team, student success teams, in that spirit of making that student journey as smooth as possible.

  [0:03:16] BHA: I the way you speak from such an asset mindset related to AI, right? We're both enhancing teams, we're smoothing out processes for the end user. I think it is a really exciting time to dive into this work. Can you talk more about how you arrived at bridging higher ed with AI?

  [0:03:36] ES: Yeah, for sure. For me personally, I've spent the last more than 20 years working with colleges. That's obviously taken a lot of a different shape over the years, because when I first started my career, one of my very first projects was bringing the application online, right? This was a billion years ago now, where I was working with a school who had only a paper application and bringing that process into, at the time, modern day —which meant bringing that application from a paper process onto online. When I applied for colleges, I remember painstakingly taking out my nicest pen and writing on a photocopy of the common application, thinking like, "Gosh, my really neat handwriting is really going to get the attention of the schools that I'm applying for."

  Over that period of time, we've certainly had different manifestations of technology changing and the available technology changing the ways in which we interact with students and the ways in which we interact with colleges, if we're a student or a family. Over the years, I've worked with probably 600 colleges on everything from enrollment recruiting strategy, CRM and operations side of things — like the ways in which we keep records for students and recruit them. The ways in which we communicate with students, so the ways in which we write email to students, or the ways in which we train our recruiter staff to really give an engaging presentation. I've had this really cool opportunity to work with so, so many colleges on all of this stuff around enrollment, recruitment and admissions.

  Now that AI is really available to us…and here in my rural CollegeVine, I get to be really strategic with colleges about how we deploy these AI agents to do this work. I think it's this really interesting time, because students have this really high expectation of that we're going to give them this awesome experience. Students are used to getting things in Netflix and getting things in Amazon, right? I'm now mad when Netflix doesn't suggest the next best show for me to watch, because why wouldn't they know what I want to watch next? Students are bringing that experience and bringing that expectation into what they expect the treatment as a consumer is from the college side of things. On the college side, what I don't think students know is that we're working really hard to get to know a great number of students. We really care on the college side to get to know them deeply. We want to know their families, we want to know what they're worried about. As we recruit more and more students and as the admissions funnel at particularly like Bucknell, like popular places, gets bigger and bigger, it's harder to do that and harder to gut that out on the human level.

  What I think is really cool about the way we can deploy AI agents is that both things can be true. If you're an audio listener, you're not seeing this behind me, but I have a sign that's lit up that says, “Hello humans.” I get the irony of being the AI lady with a sign lit up behind me that says like, “Hello humans,” as a reminder to say, "AI is this leverage point that we can do a lot more human caring and getting to know in this work if we have the right tool set behind us." That's what I think the most exciting part about bridging higher education and AI, and bringing this ethical, helpful AI into the hands of the folks who are trying to do this really high-value, mission-driven work of getting to know students and helping get access to higher education. That's really important to me.

  [0:07:06] BT: Yeah, something that comes up for me when you're describing this work is enhancement. One of the ways that Bucknell has partnered with CollegeVine to scale up this work, as you're talking about, is bringing it into our admissions process. One front-end example is our AI recruiter named Ray. For those who haven't interacted with Ray, or are still trying to figure out what exactly an AI recruiter tool is or does, how does that specific example work to enhance the admissions experience?

  [0:07:34] BHA: Yeah. Okay. Here's a good example. We're recording this on a Monday morning. I realize there is no enrollment leader who starts a Monday morning meeting with the admissions staff going like, “Okay, how many times did the phone ring over the weekend that we weren't able to handle?” We are adults in work who have families, and responsibilities, and grocery shopping and other stuff, which means we are not sitting at our desks 24/7 to be able to handle incoming requests from students, or be able to help them move forward in the admissions process, when they need it — or even in what language they need, or in what mediums they need.

  We're reaching out to students when they're in high school, where our work day is not attuned to the use case of, like, “Yo, I need help with my FAFSA. I know I need my parent to do that with me (the Federal Financial Aid Form). But here's my problem. I need you to work with my dad on this, but my dad doesn't get done with work until 10:00 at night, and my dad only speaks Spanish.” That is a service level that we should be offering students and that should be offered to students. Students have this expectation, like, it's not out of a lack of wanting to offer that to students, but just how are we going to deliver that? When we think about working with the AI recruiter, you should have this really high standard of interaction that that use case is going to get solved. You could have a phone call with a really helpful AI agent that doesn't frustrate you. You're not going to be saying like, “Get to a human. A human.” The phone call can be going really well and smoothly and effortlessly switch back between your dad's Spanish and your English to get this job done, which is getting your FAFSA completion in.

  I think when we think about working with AI, or an AI agent in general, I think the mindset you can hold, or the mental model that you can hold onto, is this: as if I'm talking to a person to accomplish work, right? That's what working with an AI agent is, whether it's the AI agent is trying to get you to do something, like register for an event, or finish your application and be truly helpful with you in finishing those steps. Or if you need something from the agent, just like I might call you on the phone, Brooke, and say like, “Hey, I'm blocked here and here.” You might say like, “Okay, let's work on this together.” That's the mindset that you should have about the AI agent, is that it's not just sitting back on its heels, waiting to get instructions from you. It's actually going to proactively help you move through the process in a way that works for you, the individual, right? It's going to treat me differently than it's going to treat Becca. It's going to treat Becca differently than the ways in which we treat Brooke — and that's all in the spirit of machine learning and a lot of data that can offer this truly individualized experience. Versus, "Becca, students like you might be interested in clubs like this." That's no longer adequate. It should feel like, “You, Becca, are going to come to Bucknell and join this club sport and be involved in this activity.” That's the feeling that the AI agent can offer.

  [0:10:45] BHA: This idea of helping students complete tasks, not only does it help the student literally cross that off their to-do list, submit that application by the deadline, but it also helps the college universities. Because now we have a complete application that we can read that, maybe had that step not been completed with the level of support that that student needed, maybe we couldn't have moved that student forward in our process, even though they were a really viable candidate. I just see it as so mutually beneficial.

  [0:11:13] ES: Well, I mean, here's a question for you two. Do you feel any ownership in closing the guidance gap with students? By that, I mean, we all know that students typically don't have access to enough adequate guidance in high schools — and this is not at the fault of high schools. This is systemic, right, where we are saying the job of a high school counselor is to do….You have 500 students, and you need to do mental health, and certificate completion, and pathways out of a high school that are not college — military, vocational, community college, get a job — all these different things. And you're also a high school college counselor. That's way too many things in one job with way too big of a caseload.

  Do you feel, as admissions counselors, that you own some of the education around the college process and how we do this? I'm wondering, do you key how AI can be assistive to you and your roles when we talk about closing the guidance gap?

  [0:12:13] BHA: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's one of the reasons the podcast, our podcast, College Admissions Insider, at all was born, right? We're providing college resources, college tips, tricks, application insights about colleges and universities broadly. Yeah, of course, we're both at Bucknell, many of our guests are at Bucknell, but we're still talking about the process broadly, and we're providing resources for students and for their parents to navigate the process, all with the goal of demystifying the process. The podcast is one way that we do that, but I could see AI being another tool.

  [0:12:45] ES: Yeah, that's actually a really cool analog, right, where the podcast is. You're saying like, well, we care less about driving students to apply to Bucknell, and we really care about pulling the curtain back on the process to be a good and helpful resource. Okay. I think that's awesome.

  [0:13:00] BHA: I know you mentioned personalization and what maybe historically personalization has looked like, and what AI can help personalization look like today and in the future. Does that extend beyond a student's interaction with a recruiter like Ray?

  [0:13:17] ES: Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the ways in which we think about increasingly higher order communication. We might think about communication that's customized. I think about customized communication, as things like, "Brooke, students like you might be interested in clubs like this." Then I think about personalization, which is including some details about a student, to make the student feel felt. And colleges for many years have deployed both customization and personalization in communication to make the students feel felt, and to signal to the students a very genuine desire to get to know students and families as individuals, right? Because we're essentially recruiting students into a community to say like, "You can come and be a part of this community." Right? That's what we're “selling.”

  I think there's a higher order beyond personalization and customization, which is individualization, right? I think that's what we are striving to push up and to the right in these quadrants of pushing into individualization. Instead of saying, “We care to get to know students like you,” it's much more of an individual like, “No, no. We're talking about you, the individual. We understand the things you are scared about, the things that you are going to make that decision on, the things that motivate and drive you and your family's decisions about finances and choice, and timing.” All of these things.

  I think because AI can hold in its head across many, many, many, many thousands of data points, we can actually leverage AI across many different communication modes to offer this experience. When we talk about AI recruiter, we're not just talking about the ways in which we're generating better email for colleges. Because if you're a student out there, you have a completely full inbox of emails that just feel probably pretty tone deaf to who you are and what you're up to. This is happening across email, text messages, phone calls, chatbots on colleges' websites, right? This is all multimodal. This is getting to know you, the individual.

  The other thing that I'll add here is, in the spirit of demystifying the college process, the thing that I want to point out and show over time is that 10 and 20 years ago, colleges were dealing with very much smaller numbers of prospective students, right? When I went to college more than 20 years ago, and even when you both went to college some time ago, colleges had smaller funnels. They had smaller numbers of prospective students to deal with. Over time, colleges have reached out to more and more and more students in the spirit of trying to get more and more applications to try to serve more and more students. There is a drive, obviously, for many colleges to become more and more selective. However we feel about that, we can leave that aside. I think there is an important sort of education note to say, colleges are dealing with more prospective students than ever before. Becca and Brooke, have you had over your careers, exponentially more recruiters join your team?

  [0:16:25] BHA: Not in alignment with the growth of our inquiries. No.

  [0:16:29] ES: Exactly, exactly. We actually cannot scale the human workforce to get to know students the way we want to, and the way we know is really important, in order to track with that growth. That's the thing that I'll expose to your audience to say, we're not deploying AI across the college process to be lazy. Becca and Brooke aren't just going to play pickleball all afternoon now. They're still busy as heck trying to get to know individual students. We just need more leverage and power behind these recruiting efforts because of that big growth, that we can actually track the humans to support.

  [0:17:07] BT: I think everything you've shared so far has given us such great insight into all of the different ways that a student and prospective students might interact with AI on that very front-facing end. And how colleges are really utilizing these tools to, like you have said, enhance and upscale that experience to keep it focused on that human connection. But that's not the only way that colleges are leveraging AI, or that a student might even experience that. As you mentioned before, there are plenty of different ways to deploy AI agents throughout a student's college journey after they arrive for that first semester. What are some of those ways that students and families might not realize?

  [0:17:48] ES: Well, I think the important thing to remember is that colleges view themselves as the protectors and creators of growth mindset. We exist as higher education to create better humans for a better earth. That's why colleges exist, and that’s why we care to support higher education, just if you're into that. I'm assuming your audience is into that, given that they're listening. I think the thing that I think about with AI is part of that support of that growth mindset, and creating humans that are ready to go out onto earth and make it a better place is understanding that innovation and understanding how to use AI, how to view AI, how to use AI responsibly and ethically, that's all part of the world now.

  We might want to litigate how we feel about AI, or how we view it in our day to day lives. If you're a parent out there, this might be showing up in your work, you might be resisting it, or you might be welcoming it. If you're a student out there, you might be, again, resisting it or welcoming it. I do think that there is this aspect of AI as just a thing that's around to stay. I think the thing we can expect over time is that in all things that you experience — whether it's the admissions process in the ways that we've been talking about, or as an enrolled student at any college or university — is that you will likely have access to AI agents and tools in order to do a bunch of things, whether that's reacting to you and helping you with teaching and learning, getting access to tutoring and writing help, getting access to the ways in which you should view AI as a student and as a scholar. Also, in your constituent experience as an enrolled student as an institution, you will likely have more and more exposure to AI that can help you do things: get a parking permit, get tutoring help, schedule time with your advisor, pay a bill, drop a class.

  I had this weird experience of going to college and feeling really prepared for college. I went to a prep school myself and went to a liberal arts college, not unlike Bucknell. I felt really prepared for the academics side of things. In that, I'm very privileged and very lucky. A great preparation there. I will never forget the first time I had to interact with a registrar. In that time, I was going to some weird, moldy building with a postcard that I had to write on with a particular pencil and push really hard, because there's this stuff called carbon paper, because I had to make three different copies of a thing. Then I had to walk these three different copies to these different other moldy offices to go register for courses. That felt mind-blowing to me, like bizarre. There are still vestiges of those process things that students need to do, that I think AI can be really helpful. Would I have rather picked up the phone and been like, “Hey, I need to register for classes. I want one of these and one of those. Will that conflict here?” That would have been the better experience for me, and I think that's what we're now able to offer students.

  I think students, both in the name of exposure to good and safe innovation, but also in the name of just getting things done really smoothly, that AI is going to show up in so many aspects of your student experience. As well as the ways in which, once you graduate and your institution makes you super successful and ready to go out on earth, it's going to help you get a job, stay connected to the institution, stay connected to the alumni, get connected with humans in a way that feels very high-powered. Again, I think about leverage, and I think about true leverage as a way to do more, faster, and better across lots of different places of that student journey with that high expectation of really good service, and individualization, and personalization throughout.

  [0:21:32] BHA: Hey, I appreciate the example about adding or dropping a class. I think we've all had those experiences in higher education, or otherwise, that we just finish a process and we're like, “Man, that was really antiquated" — like renewing your passport, or just some of these technical things. I just really appreciate the way CollegeVine and maybe others in the space, too, are asking, "Okay, how can we improve that experience from start to finish?" I think you've spoken to all of the human touch and human elements that just make it a better process for all, but let's take a moment and speak directly to the skeptics, or those who are feeling a little resistant about AI entering their college admissions process, those who might be concerned specifically about replacing that human element. How would you respond to somebody who's a leader in this field?

  [0:22:21] ES: Yeah. I have this cool advantage in my life, where for the last 20 years I've spoken to, I don't know, minimum of five, maximum of 20 colleges a week every week for that period of time. I feel so confident that I have a good cross-section of what colleges care about, or what admissions people care about. I will say this really plainly to your audience of particularly students and parents, there is literally no college that doesn't care about individual students and that isn't altruistically and genuinely invested in the success of individual humans. Nobody is out running admissions thinking like, "This is a business, and we're just going to run those numbers and crank the handle and get more students." Nobody is oriented around that. Everybody cares about, "Let's make sure students find the right fit. Let's make sure students feel felt. Let's make sure students are healthy, happy, safe, right?" That's really what we sit around talking about. I want to make sure that students, particularly parents, if you're like, “Well, how does this show up?” Nobody is deploying AI solutions to become more rigorously efficient without thinking about the impacts to knowing your students and keeping that healthy, happy, safe triangle in the center of our minds.

  I think, particularly — let me give you an example — I talked to a lot of schools about the ways in which we can make the application process better operationalized. What students and families might not know is that, if we even look at processing your students’ transcript, transcripts across high schools are crazy varied. We might see a transcript where it's a transcript from Florida, and it's 14 pages and includes vaccinations, and middle school grades, and all these codes that we can't decipher. We might see a transcript from a New York public school that is one page, landscape orientation, with a lot of different codes. There is so much work that goes into a college looking at that material from your student and making a determination about, like, even just simple academic preparedness. I know at Bucknell, you're thinking about things like rigor and highest math to make sure that students are going to be successful. It's not so much about whether we admit the student or not; it's like, first, to check on understanding if a student's going to be successful or not.

  Nobody wants to deploy AI — in my talking to colleges,  not very many schools, and almost none — want to deploy AI to take humans out of the holistic review process. But here's a story from a school who actually has their admissions counselors reviewing transcripts and applications that include essays. When we worked with this group of counselors, they were like, "Yeah. Actually, because we have to process these transcripts, and understand these different codes, and piece through all these materials on the student's academic record, we're spending so much time on the transcript that we're skimming the essay. That feels crappy, because we are not spending time getting to know these students in the ways in which they want us to know them, which is to read the essay and understand their extracurriculars.” For that school, we've deployed transcript processing as an AI-ified thing to get the staff freed up, so that they can spend time on what they care about, which is the essay and reading that and taking in this holistic review.

  Schools, I think, that's the thing that I will share, is that schools really want to maintain and improve and increase the human touch. But given how much work that's created in the admissions process, it's really, really hard. I think that transcript example can feel like, "Oh, I'm not going to be machinized and then seen as just a series of numbers." It's like, yeah, let's think about how we can deploy AI to make this tactical thing go faster, so that we can get to know the individual person.

  [0:26:17] BHA: As we round out today's episode, we have talked pretty extensively about the higher education landscape in general, all of the ways that AI can enhance not only the experience for colleges and universities, but also for our prospective students and current students, and their families throughout the process. Emily, is there one thing that students and families should keep in mind about the college journey as a whole?

  [0:26:41] ES: Yeah. I think the things that I would think about is that nobody is out to get you in this process. I do think that, again, I will be the maybe kinder, wiser other to say, I talk to colleges all day every day, for frigging a billion years. I will say that the admissions folks that you interact with, everyone's there for you, and everyone wants to be supportive of this journey in different ways. I think, I will say, there's no one right spot, I think. When I think about my own college journey, I think someone directed me into thinking, everything you do in the college process should be in the service of getting you to that answer of like, “Can I be a part of this?”

  I think, whether it's the ways in which you interact with people, place, technology, that all of these things should line up to you to feel felt. And I think you should hold a quite high standard for the ways in which colleges signal that they care to get to know you and be supportive of those things, again, in that triangle of healthy, happy, safe, right?

  I think, when I think about technology, and I think about innovation, I think the ways in which a college deploys — whether it's deploying AI, or deploying new software, you're getting a new marketing automation from a different college – it should all feel unified for this greater experience of like, "Is this in the service of getting to know me? Is this supportive of getting to that answer of like, can I be a part of this?" That's how I would organize my thinking, and how I would have your audience organize their thinking about the college process, in terms of technology and in terms of feeling like you can be part of any one given community.

  [0:28:37] BT: I know I have loved having you on this episode, to not only deepen my knowledge of how schools Bucknell are utilizing and leveraging AI in their college processes, but to also really peel back the curtain on what can feel like this mystical, magical realm of AI for students who want to feel informed and empowered when interacting with it throughout their college journey. Thank you so much for joining us.

  [0:29:00] ES: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate and wish that my 18-year-old self, 17-year-old self, had your podcast at the time that I was applying to college in 1999. And podcasts weren't a thing at that time. I just really appreciate that you have this ownership of demystifying the process and bridging the guidance gap. I think it's really cool that you're attempting to expose your listeners to, I don't know, even this high-tech world, which is all new, and we're figuring it out. It's pretty fun.

  [0:29:32] BHA: Thanks, Emily. Thanks to everyone out there listening. If you're a fan of the podcast, please take a moment to rate, subscribe and share this episode with the students and families in your life.

  [0:29:42] BT: We'll be back with another episode in a few weeks. In the meantime, send your questions, comments and episode ideas to podcast@bucknell.edu. We read every note you send.

  [0:29:53] BHA: Finally, you're invited to follow Bucknell on all your favorite social media apps. Just look for @BucknellU on Instagram, Facebook, X, YouTube and TikTok. You can follow our student-run Instagram account, which is @IAmRayBucknell.

  [0:30:07] BT: Until next time, keep on reaching for your dreams and your dream school.

  [END]