There’s a question that has driven a lot of the most important work in higher education over the past decade: What would change if every student could get the guidance they need, exactly when they need it?
It’s a question that motivated our earliest experiments in conversational AI for college enrollment. It animated our work at Georgia State University, where timely, personalized nudges helped students navigate the fragile stretch between admission and actually showing up on campus. And it’s a question our field is still working to answer, now with far more powerful tools at its disposal.
That’s what made the recent Common App Illuminate conference so energizing. In a conference-wide brainstorming session, attendees came together around the question: How can AI help drive access and innovation in the college admissions process? What came back wasn’t a wish list of futuristic features. It was something more grounded and more urgent: a shared recognition that the barriers students face are well-documented, that the solutions have long been out of reach at scale, and that we may finally be at a turning point.
The ideas that surfaced clustered into themes that are worth unpacking together.
The Core Problem Hasn’t Changed. The Opportunity Has.
For years, the college admissions process has looked very different depending on the support students have around them: those with experienced counselors, well-resourced high schools, and informed family networks navigate it very differently than those without. First-generation students, low-income students, and students from historically underserved communities often face the same steps, but without the safety net of people who’ve done it before.
This isn’t new information. What’s new is that AI is beginning to make it possible to close that gap at scale.
The Illuminate participants were aligned about this. A big theme across the brainstorming was using AI to level the playing field, not as an abstract goal, but in concrete ways: reaching first-generation students earlier in their high school careers (9th and 10th grade, not just senior year), meeting students where they’re already comfortable asking questions, and matching them with institutions that actually fit their goals and circumstances.
There was real emphasis on reaching students earlier in their journeys, and it’s easy to understand why. The students who fall through the cracks most often do so not because they aren’t capable, but because the right information didn’t reach them at the right moment.
Personalization Isn’t a Nice-to-Have. It’s the Engine.
One of the clearest threads running through the Illuminate session was personalization, and the shift from thinking about it as a luxury to recognizing it as the actual engine of equitable access.
We’ve long known that a well-timed, relevant message performs better than a generic one. What’s changed is the ability to deliver that kind of tailored guidance to thousands of students at once. Customized communications. Contextually appropriate outreach. Meeting each student where they are in the process, not treating everyone as if they’re starting from the same place.
This is exactly the insight that drove our early work in student engagement: timing matters, clarity counts, and the right next step, delivered at the right moment, can change outcomes in measurable ways. The evidence built up across enrollment, financial aid, registration, and persistence shows that the principle holds. AI doesn’t change what works. It makes personalization possible at a scale that was never realistic before.
Efficiency Isn’t the Goal. It’s What Makes the Goal Possible.
A lot of the Illuminate brainstorming focused on automation: routine processes, backend administrative tasks, application screening, GPA recalculation, data standardization. It would be easy to read this as a conversation about productivity. But we think that framing undersells what’s really going on.
The real argument is about where human attention goes.
When admissions counselors spend most of their time on administrative work that could be handled systematically, they have less time for the conversations that actually move students forward. And the students most likely to need a human conversation — a first-generation applicant who doesn’t know what a CSS Profile is, a student who doesn’t realize a missing document is about to derail their enrollment — are also the students least likely to proactively seek one out.
AI-driven efficiency isn’t about doing more with fewer people. It’s about freeing the people you have to do the work that only people can do. The Illuminate participants were clear on this: AI should augment admissions professionals, not replace them. Katie Condon, Assistant Vice President for Enrollment Affairs at the University of West Florida, put it well: “We didn’t need more people — we needed the right strategy to scale our team’s impact.” The result was a 26% increase in freshman enrollment in a single year, with no additional staff. Read the UWF story.
Reducing Friction Is a Form of Equity Work
The admissions process is, by almost any measure, genuinely complicated. Forms, deadlines, portals, financial aid documents, supplemental essays, institutional requirements that vary in ways that aren’t always transparent: the friction is real, and it falls hardest on students who don’t have a guide.
The Illuminate discussion named this head-on. Reducing friction throughout the application process, reducing student anxiety, building student confidence: These aren’t soft goals. They’re exactly how students who might otherwise disengage stay in the process long enough to succeed.
There’s a behavioral insight here worth naming: students are more likely to engage through a low-friction digital channel than by walking into an office. For a student who already feels like they don’t belong in the room, that difference matters enormously. Conversational AI can create a kind of low-stakes entry point, a place to ask the question you’re afraid to ask, that no amount of office hours can replicate. LSU saw this play out directly: when they lowered the barrier to reaching out, incoming student messages increased by 200% year-over-year. See how LSU built a culture of help-seeking.
Better Data in Service of Fuller Pictures
One of the themes that came up repeatedly at Illuminate was the challenge of understanding applicants more fully and consistently. Participants talked about the difficulty of making fair comparisons across very different high schools, surfacing the context behind a transcript, and helping readers see the full picture of a student’s experience.
The real opportunity here is context at scale. Admissions readers are asked to make nuanced judgments about thousands of applicants, often with incomplete pictures. Conversational engagement can help fill those gaps, surfacing what students are actually thinking and struggling with in ways that structured data often can’t.
Our field has an opportunity, and a responsibility, to shape how these tools get used. The Illuminate conversation showed real awareness of this: the goal isn’t to automate judgment away from humans, but to give them better information and structured context so they can make more consistent, more equitable decisions.
What We’ve Learned, and Where It Points
The early chapters of AI in higher ed were about proving a hypothesis: that timely, conversational, personalized support could make a measurable difference in student outcomes. That hypothesis has been tested across hundreds of institutions, millions of student interactions, and multiple points in the student lifecycle. The evidence is clear enough that the question has shifted.
It’s no longer can this work? It’s how do we make it work best for every student, especially those who need it most?
That’s a more interesting question, and a harder one. What works for a community college student balancing work, family, and school looks different from what works at a large research university. The moment that matters for a first-generation applicant navigating summer melt looks nothing like what a continuing student managing a financial hold needs. Getting this right means understanding not just the technology, but the student, the institution, and the specific friction that’s in the way.
The Illuminate conversation made clear that we’re ready to dig into that harder question. Institutions of all sizes are looking for ways to do things that were previously out of reach: deliver consistent support across large populations, reach students who weren’t reachable before, and make the capabilities that well-resourced institutions take for granted available to everyone.
This Is Our Moment
The themes that came out of Common App’s Illuminate conference aren’t new problems with new solutions. They’re enduring challenges — access, equity, belonging, the gap between what students need and what institutions can provide — that new tools are finally making it possible to address at scale.
What we do with this moment matters. The technology will keep evolving regardless. The question is how we work together to make sure the tools we build serve everyone, and that no student gets left behind in the process.
What’s left is the work itself, and the opportunity to do it together, building something that serves every learner, at every institution, at every step of the journey.