Most of us know the feeling. You open a customer service chat with a simple question, and the bot asks for information you already gave it, suggests a fix that doesn’t apply, and tells you it understands your frustration. By the time a real person joins, you’re annoyed with the whole company, not just the bot.
That frustration usually comes down to placement. The bot showed up at the exact moment you needed a person who could actually help.
It’s not surprising that high school students feel the same way about colleges. In our new Student Enrollment Expectations Report, 57% of students said knowing a college uses AI agents to contact students makes them less likely to apply.
That’s a tough number for enrollment teams who’ve been told AI is the future of recruitment. So if more AI agents aren’t the answer, where does AI actually fit?
Nearly 6,000 high school seniors weighed in on that, too. While they’re not asking colleges to stop using AI entirely, they are asking colleges to use it responsibly, and they were pretty clear about what that means.
Students use AI, but they use it carefully
It’s easy to assume Gen Z hands everything over to AI, but data says otherwise. 45% of students have used an AI tool during their college search, which is basically flat from the 47% we measured last year. Only 3% use it daily, and 41% never use it at all.
The students who do use AI treat it as a starting point, with only 2% trusting AI answers completely. 67% say they double-check anything important, and 71% look at the sources AI cites at least some of the time. When they have a question about a specific college, more than half go straight to the college’s website.
In their written responses, students described a pretty consistent set of personal usage rules.
- AI is good for quick research and staying organized.
- Anything important gets verified.
- The tough questions stay with people.
Here’s what a few students had to say in their own words:
“AI has been great for quickly comparing programs, organizing deadlines, and getting basic questions answered, but I still rely on direct feedback from current students, admissions counselors, and campus visits to make my final decision.”
“AI is helpful for broad and general information, and giving me a baseline for research. However, it’s just that, a baseline, and it’s important that I do research on my own from official websites.”
“I haven’t used AI for my college search, because AI is wrong a lot and when it comes to a big decision like choosing a college, I want to make the most educated decision.”
Even though this question asked students about their own AI use, 7% of them turned it around to warn colleges against using AI on them:
“I have not used AI in my college search just yet, but some colleges have used AI to reach out to me, which makes me feel less seen. It feels impersonal, like I am a task rather than a person they actually want to attend their school.”
That’s the same standard students want colleges to meet. Here’s what it looks like in practice.
Rule 1: Let students start the conversation
Who starts the conversation matters a lot. When a student starts a conversation with a college’s AI agent, 27% are comfortable with it. When the AI agent reaches out first, comfort drops to 13% and discomfort jumps to 34%.
Same technology, very different reaction. A chatbot on your website is something a student chose to use. An AI-driven text or email cadence shows up whether they asked for it or not.
So keep AI where students come looking for answers and keep people on outbound outreach.
Capture’s Enrollment Scout lives on your website, where the student has already come to you. It uses each visitor’s behavioral profile to answer their questions with context, so a student researching your business program gets business answers instead of a canned overview. When the conversation moves to outreach, that’s a job for your team.
Rule 2: Match the task to the tool
We asked students who should handle eight common enrollment tasks: a real person, a college’s AI agent, or either one. A real person won every time.
The order of that list tells you a lot. Students are most open to AI on quick, transactional tasks like scheduling a visit or checking a deadline. The heavier the moment gets, emotionally or financially, the more they want a person. Financial aid, fit, and sensitive questions are where AI support drops to single digits. As one student put it:
“AI can be a useful tool because it helps me find information faster. When things are personal, for example mental health or financial aid, a real human should be involved.”
This is also where your team’s time matters most. Capture’s Priority Scores combine engagement and affinity to show which students are most likely to act, and Counselor Copilot turns that into a daily outreach list with each student’s behavioral history attached. Counselors can spend their energy on the high-stakes conversations students want a person for and walk into each one already knowing what that student cares about.
Rule 3: Get it right, because students are checking
Students give AI less grace than they give people. When a college message gets a detail wrong, 31% say it bothers them more when AI wrote it, compared to 25% when a person did. If you use AI anywhere in your process, accuracy is part of using it responsibly.
And students are checking. 67% double-check what AI tells them, and when they do, they usually end up on your website. One student explained:
“AI has helped me to recommend different colleges, courses, or scholarships I would be a good fit for. After I get that information from AI I always double check with the specific website.”
That makes your website the source of truth for two audiences at once: students checking an AI’s answer, and the AI tools pulling information about your institution. Program pages, real cost information, and current deadlines need to be accurate, easy to find, and clearly structured.
Rule 4: Practice what you preach
This one caught us a little off guard. We never asked students about academic integrity but a group of them brought it up anyway, in almost identical language. They’re told not to use AI on their schoolwork and applications, sometimes with real consequences. But then the same institutions send them recruitment messages that are clearly AI-generated. One student put it bluntly:
“It’s hypocritical to have an anti-AI policy in a college’s academic system yet use it to send emails.”
Students are connecting your outreach to your values. When we asked them to explain how they react to a college clearly using an AI agent, negative responses outnumbered accepting ones more than two to one. The most common theme was simply “give me a real person.” Right behind it: AI outreach reads as lazy, like the college doesn’t care.
If your institution has an AI policy for students, read your recruitment comms against it. The standard you set for them is the one they’ll hold you to.
Rule 5: Put AI to work behind the scenes
None of this means taking AI off the table. Students are drawing a line between AI that replaces people and AI that helps people do their jobs better. One student described exactly how they’d want it set up:
“I think initial connection through an AI agent is fine. Once the school is aware that I am interested, I would hope that it is filtered to a human to begin the recruitment process.”
That’s where AI earns its keep in enrollment: figuring out who’s interested, what they care about, and when someone should reach out. Capture has worked this way since 2014.
Stealth ID identifies students who are researching your institution before they ever fill out a form, and Student 360 Profiles show your counselors what each one has explored across your site. Priority Scores surface who’s most likely to act. Then your team takes it from there.
When Counselor Copilot drafts an email, text, or phone script, a counselor reviews and edits it before it goes anywhere. Nothing AI-generated goes out on your behalf without a person signing off throughout the funnel. The AI does the legwork, but your team builds the relationship.
Where to start
If you want a quick gut check, map every place AI touches a student in your enrollment process today. For each one, ask two questions. Did the student start this conversation? And is this a moment students told us they’d want a person for? Anything that fails both is worth a second look.
The Student Enrollment Expectations Report has the full data on how students feel about AI in the college search, plus practical tips from Capture’s team on where to begin.
And if you’d like to see how AI can work quietly in the background while your team stays at the center of every conversation, our team can walk you through how Capture makes that happen for enrollment teams like yours.
Frequently asked questions
How do students use AI in their college search?
45% of students have used an AI tool during their college search, according to Capture’s Student Enrollment Expectations Report. ChatGPT is the most popular, followed by Google Gemini. Most students use AI for quick research and staying organized. Only 3% use it daily, and 41% don’t use it at all.
Do students trust what AI tells them about colleges?
Mostly not. Only 2% of students trust AI answers completely. 67% say they double-check important information, and 71% look at the sources AI cites at least some of the time. When students have a question about a specific college, 57% go straight to the college’s website first.
How do students feel about colleges using AI in recruitment?
Many students react negatively. The data found that 57% of students said knowing a college uses AI agents to contact students makes them less likely to apply. 55% said their view of a college becomes more negative when a message feels AI-generated.
Do students prefer talking to a chatbot or a real person?
It depends on who starts the conversation and what it’s about. Students are more comfortable with AI when they start the conversation, like asking a chatbot on a college’s website a question. But when we asked who should handle eight common enrollment tasks, students picked a real person every time.
How can colleges use AI responsibly in admissions?
Students want AI working behind the scenes. That means using it to understand which students are interested and what they care about, so counselors can reach out at the right time with the right information. Like Counselor Copilot, any AI-generated content should be reviewed and edited by a person before it reaches a student.
Can students tell when a college email is written by AI?
Students think they can. 60% assume half or more of the college messages they receive are written mostly by AI. The biggest tell is generic or vague wording, which means even human-written emails can read as AI. Read more about the AI tells students look for.
