Earlier this year, Rick Clark found himself in an eye-opening conversation on a panel about artificial intelligence. Before the talk, Clark, Tech’s Executive Director for Strategic Student Access in Enrollment Management, had assumed that however convincing ChatGPT could be at mimicking a high schooler writing a personal essay for a college application, there would be a technology equally capable of detecting it. “I thought there would be a reverse AI bot that could scan these essays,” he says.
He was wrong. Clark was on the panel with alumnus David Joyner, the executive director of Tech’s Online Education & OMSCS program. Joyner described how quickly the technology was changing and explained how any detection tools would likely produce false positives.
That changed Clark’s approach. “I knew we needed to talk to students, given how ubiquitous AI has become,” he says. So Georgia Tech pioneered a path forward, becoming one of the first schools—if not the first—to provide guidance on the use of generative AI like ChatGPT in college admissions.
AI is one topic that Clark and his co-author, high school guidance counselor Brennan Barnard, discuss in the new edition of their book, The Truth About College Admission. Clark sat down recently with the Alumni Magazine to discuss the book and predict future trends in admissions and enrollment.
Q: What’s new in this edition?
We heard from families who wanted more information about paying for college and how to have a healthy family conversation around the realities of the cost. This book provides resources and facilitates conversations around that topic. We also included post-pandemic updates, such as information on the test-optional movement. Of four-year schools, 82% are test-optional or don’t look at tests. Georgia Tech requires testing, but my advice for students applying to schools that don’t require it is to look at the average test scores of those who were admitted. If your score is average or higher, send your test in.
We knew advice about emerging technologies like AI could become outdated, so we also created QR codes in the book for more resources, including blogs and podcasts.
Q: What is Georgia Tech’s guidance on using AI in the college admissions process?
The way we look at this is it’s not cheating, and we don’t think it’s unethical to use ChatGPT or other generative AI. But there’s a proper way to use it. We recommend students approach it like they would a conversation with a friend or a classmate to help brainstorm and get their ideas on paper. You benefit from discussing ideas and what you want to communicate before writing. We don’t think students should have ChatGPT open, however, while they’re writing an essay, or copy and paste from it. It shouldn’t be used as a panacea for their essay.
Q: Are you training staff to look for essays that might have been written with generative AI?
In talking with colleagues at other schools, our common wisdom is, don’t worry about what’s happening on the other side. We need to determine our rubrics for evaluating essays and look at what we’re asking for. We tell students, we’re looking for specificity, unique details, and a personalized voice. And that’s not what ChatGPT does well. So, if a kid were to do what we tell them not to do, they’re going to have a subpar essay because it’s not detailed or specific enough.
Q: What effect could AI have on the college essay?
I actually think this might break the college admission essay going forward. I believe this may be what ultimately forces schools to allow students, instead of writing an essay, to submit video or audio recordings in response to an essay question. We were never reading essays for grammar in the first place, so why are we asking for written essays? In the next two years, there’s going to be a significant proliferation of schools that move toward accepting a recently submitted essay from a high school assignment and a minute-or-so-long video or recording of a response to a particular question.
Q: Are you implementing AI in the admission process?
Yes. More on the machine learning side, we’ve been talking with C21U (Georgia Tech’s Center for 21st Century Universities) about pilot projects. For us and other schools, we use a lot of human time scanning transcripts for information. What machine learning does well is scrape information. I think in the next cycle, we’ll be at a place where those functional and important tasks, but not higher-level thinking tasks, move over to AI.
Q: What other trends do you expect to see?
Outside of AI, the big one is the Supreme Court case reversing affirmative action. For schools that use holistic admissions, two things that will change the most are a real ramp-up in recruitment, and then, once you’ve admitted students, you’ll have to work harder and have a campuswide effort to reach your institutional goals of having a diverse student body.
Q: Where do you see legacy admissions in the future?
I do think you’re going to see court cases, and we already have seen them at the state and federal levels, challenging legacy. That’s something to watch, particularly with the Ivy League schools. We don’t use legacy admission for first-year admission. We do have a conditional one-year pathway for transfer students with a family member who went to Georgia Tech.
Q: This year’s enrollment numbers are record-breaking. What’s on the horizon for enrollment?
President Cabrera and the system really want to see Georgia Tech expand access, particularly to Georgians, but also across the board. That’s because our students are so highly sought after. Right now, we’re on track to get to a first-year class of 4,000 by the 2026 academic year.
Q: What are some trends that concern you?
The truth is so many good things are happening at Tech. It’s great that we have more students who want to come to Tech than ever before. That’s a sign of strength. Where we’re not doing well is serving low-income students. As a public school, we don’t want money to be the reason a qualified student can’t come. We are doing a phenomenal job on almost every front, but we need support from the community for need-based scholarships, which is part of the goal of Georgia Tech’s Transforming Tomorrow campaign.