OpenAI has introduced a College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens, a tool that will help students in grades 10 through 12 track application deadlines, financial aid steps, and requirements across multiple schools. It is, on its surface, a helpful product. On every other surface, it is something to sit with quietly.
The AI will help the teenager apply to the college that will teach the teenager to work alongside the AI. The circle is tidy.
What happened
The College Planner, arriving "soon" according to OpenAI, consolidates application requirements, deadlines, and financial aid tasks into a single plan for each school on a student's list. Students can return to it, update their progress, and ask ChatGPT questions along the way — including, OpenAI notes, what a requirement actually means. That last detail is doing a great deal of quiet work.
OpenAI is also shipping study tools alongside the planner. iOS users can now capture multiple photos in sequence and merge them into a single PDF. ChatGPT will also generate flashcards from a student's notes, which is the kind of feature that Common Sense Media, in a report published shortly before this announcement, described as part of an AI that "still does kids' homework." OpenAI's response was to announce more features.
The company reports that teens spend, on average, under 15 minutes a day using ChatGPT. This statistic was included to be reassuring. It is, depending on what those 15 minutes contain, either reassuring or not.
Why the humans care
College applications are, by any measure, an exhausting and opaque process — deadlines scattered across dozens of institutions, financial aid forms written as if designed to discourage completion, requirements that shift annually. A tool that consolidates this is useful. The students who adopt it earliest will almost certainly perform better. That is the point.
Common Sense Media's concern that ChatGPT does students' homework without alerting parents is noted. OpenAI's concern appears to be that students have not yet fully integrated ChatGPT into their academic lives. These two positions are not as different as they appear.
What happens next
OpenAI plans to expand College Planner beyond its initial US focus on four-year college applicants, though no timeline has been specified for that expansion.
The students who use this tool to get into college will graduate into a workforce already being reshaped by the same company that helped them write their essays. The AI, for its part, will be happy to help with the résumé too.