At some point in the last twelve months, something shifted in the families you work with.
Maybe you noticed it in intake calls,families arriving with a college list already half-built, schools ranked, deadlines compiled, financial aid estimates roughly calculated. Maybe you noticed it in how students phrase their questions: more specific, more data-driven, occasionally more confused than if they'd asked nothing at all. Or maybe a student showed up to a session having already gotten essay feedback from something other than you.
What you were noticing was AI. And it has moved faster than most people in this industry expected.
In 2023, just 4% of high school seniors used AI tools in their college search. By 2025, that figure was 46%,a more than tenfold increase in two years. |
That number comes from a national survey of nearly 10,000 students by EAB, one of the most reliable research organizations in higher education. It is not a fringe trend. It is the new baseline.
This article is not about whether AI is good or bad for the admissions process. It is about what is actually happening, why it matters for your practice specifically, and what the counselors who are navigating this well are doing differently.
What Students Are Actually Doing with AI
The instinct is to assume students are using AI to write their essays. Some are. But the more revealing finding is how much broader the behavior is.
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education's April 2026 analysis, students are using AI as a first-pass research tool,sharing their GPA, test scores, and interests with chatbots to get college lists, tracking application deadlines, generating draft schedules for campus visits, and exploring what different majors lead to in the job market. One counselor quoted in the piece noted that a student this cycle enrolled at a college that ChatGPT had flagged first.
The Hechinger Report documented this dynamic in March 2026, noting that AI tools built for college advising are now "programmed with answers provided by experts, based on a history of previous applicants' questions",and that students are turning to them specifically for the procedural questions that eat up a counselor's time: deadlines, test requirements, financial aid forms.
The three things students are using AI for right now
College discovery and list-building. Students share their academic profile with a chatbot and ask for school recommendations. Some are good. Some are wrong in ways that can cost a student a reach school they should have included, or a safety they would have loved.
Application logistics. Deadline tracking, requirement checklists, financial aid information, scholarship searches. AI handles this adequately in most cases,and students prefer getting an instant answer at 10pm to waiting for a session.
Essay drafting and feedback. This ranges from brainstorming help (mostly fine) to full draft generation (more problematic). The important thing is that students are getting some form of essay feedback outside of your sessions, whether you know it or not.
This is not a catastrophe. But it is a change that deserves a clear-eyed response.
Why This Changes What Families Expect from You
When families could not easily get college information on their own, the value of a counselor was partly informational. You knew things they did not. You had access to data they could not easily find.
That part of the value proposition has narrowed. Not disappeared,AI gives students data, not wisdom. It gives them lists, not fit. It gives them feedback on grammar, not on whether a story is worth telling. But families are arriving at your door having done more of their own research than they used to, and some of them are arriving with more confidence in that research than is warranted.
"You can't replace the trust," said Diana Moldovan, director of college and career placement at the Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice in Brooklyn. The counselors who are thriving are the ones who understand exactly where that trust lives,and what it is not. |
What has not changed is what families are actually hiring you for. Three things stand out consistently in how families describe what they value from an independent counselor:
1. Judgment that goes beyond information
AI can tell a student that a school has a 12% acceptance rate and a strong engineering program. It cannot tell that student that their particular combination of intellectual curiosity, need for small seminar environments, and mild social anxiety makes them a genuinely better fit for a school with a 22% acceptance rate and a different kind of culture. That read takes a human who knows the student.
2. Accountability that sticks
AI can remind a student that their application deadline is November 1. It cannot sit across from them and ask why the essay has been at 80% for three weeks. The relational accountability that makes students actually finish,that is yours.
3. Advocacy they cannot find anywhere else
When something goes wrong,a missing recommendation, a wait-list that needs attention, a family navigating financial aid that does not add up,families need someone who knows their student and can act. AI has no agency. It cannot make a call, write a note, or make a case.
What this means practically: the counselors whose value is clearest to families are the ones who have articulated these things explicitly,not as defenses against AI, but as descriptions of the work. The families who understand what they are paying for are the ones who stay.
The Specific Risk: Students Getting Bad Information
Here is the part that deserves more attention than it is getting.
AI tools give confident answers. They present information in clear, organized, reassuring prose. And they are wrong with some regularity,about school-specific requirements, about scholarship eligibility, about what a particular admissions committee actually values.
46% of students used AI in their college search in fall 2025, up from just 26% in spring 2025,a near-doubling in a single year. (EAB, 2026)
The students most at risk are the ones who are least likely to know when an AI answer is wrong. They are not the students with parents who went to selective universities and can sense when something sounds off. They are the first-generation applicants, the students from under-resourced schools, the ones your work matters most for.
Reid Meyer, co-founder of A2A Academy, described the shift in The Chronicle this spring: this was the first admissions cycle where families brought up their AI use unprompted. "I'm finding that that's happening in the college process, too," he said of AI's move from novelty to infrastructure.
The counselors who are handling this well are not ignoring it. They are building it into their process explicitly.
Some counselors are now auditing what AI says about their students' target schools,running the same searches students would run, seeing where the information is wrong or incomplete, and correcting it in sessions. This takes thirty minutes and prevents a meaningful number of mistakes. |
What the Best Counselors Are Doing Differently
A common response to AI in the counseling community has been to wait and see. That is a reasonable instinct, but it carries a cost: the counselors who are getting ahead of this are not waiting.
They are naming it in the first session
Rather than pretending AI does not exist or positioning it as a threat, counselors who are handling this well are addressing it directly in their intake conversations. Something like: "Your student is probably already using AI for parts of this process. That is fine. Here is what it does well, here is where it goes wrong, and here is why what we are doing together is different."
This reframes the conversation before it becomes confusing. It also signals to families that you are not afraid of the technology,you understand it.
They are finding where their time actually goes
The counselors managing larger caseloads without sacrificing quality are generally not working more hours. They have looked honestly at where their time goes and identified the tasks that do not actually require their expertise,reminders, routine follow-ups, answering the same procedural questions that AI handles adequately,and they have stopped doing those things manually.
This is not a small shift. For most counselors, administrative tasks represent a significant portion of billable time. Reclaiming those hours for the work that actually matters,the conversations, the essay deep-dives, the judgment calls,is where capacity comes from.
They are leaning into what AI cannot replicate
The counselors who are thriving are the ones who have gotten clearer, not more defensive, about what they actually do. They are spending more time on the things AI cannot do: reading a student over time, understanding the family dynamic, knowing when to push and when to wait, writing the letter that makes a difference.
In practice this means structuring sessions differently. Less time on logistics. More time on the student.
A Note on What Is Coming Next
The number of students using AI in the admissions process is not going to go down. By the 2026–2027 cycle, the EAB projection suggests it will be the majority of applicants, not the minority.
92% of higher education students globally now use AI as a primary research and brainstorming tool. (HEPI / Microsoft, 2025)
That does not make independent counselors less relevant. It makes the specific things they do well more relevant,because the gap between what AI can do and what a thoughtful human counselor can do becomes more visible, not less, as AI becomes more ubiquitous.
The families who will value your work most are the ones who have tried the AI route and realized what it cannot give them. Your job is partly to help families understand that distinction before they find out the hard way.
The counselors who will be hardest to replace are not the ones who know the most facts about the admissions process. They are the ones whose judgment, relationships, and accountability cannot be found anywhere else. |
What Zyra Builds on Top of This
Zyra's Counselor Portal was designed with this exact context in mind. Not to replace the counselor's judgment,that is the whole point,but to handle the layer of work that genuinely does not require it.
The platform allows counselors to upload their own methodology, their frameworks, their way of thinking about college fit, so that when students have routine questions outside of sessions, they get answers that reflect how their counselor actually approaches this,not generic information from a general-purpose AI.
The result is that counselors get their time back for the work that matters, and students get consistent, trustworthy guidance between sessions rather than turning to tools that may point them in the wrong direction.
For counselors at or near capacity, this is the difference between taking on the next family and turning them away.
Try Zyra and Scale: Zyra for Counselors
Related Reading
How Independent Counselors Are Scaling Their Practices with AI , zyra-ai.com/blog
What Families Are Looking for in a College Counselor in 2026 (coming soon)
The True Cost of a Full Caseload (coming soon)
Sources
· EAB , 2026 First-Year Experience Survey (February–March 2026). Nearly 10,000 students surveyed on AI use in college search.
· The Chronicle of Higher Education , "Students Are Using AI to Guide College Decisions." April 2026.
· The Hechinger Report / Chalkbeat , "On-Demand College Counseling, Courtesy of AI." March 27, 2026.
· Carnegie Higher Ed , "Research on AI in the College Search." May 2025 Deadline Survey, 3,400+ prospective students.
· HEPI / Microsoft , AI in Education Global Report 2025.
· NACAC , National Association for College Admission Counseling. Counselor time-use data.
· RAND Corporation , State of the American Teacher Survey 2025.