For many students, the college search process feels overwhelming and confusing. It can seem like you have too many options and not enough guidance.
AI has already proven to be a revolutionary technology in realms that range from oceanography to cancer research. Your college search feels huge to you, but to AI, it’s an easy warm-up. No wonder nearly half of students are already using it to look for colleges!
But wise AI users know it doesn’t always give good answers, especially when it comes to personal questions. During your college search journey, you must tune in to your own needs, desires, goals, and expectations. Machines struggle to understand these human abstractions, so you shouldn’t expect AI to magically reveal your perfect college fit.
If you approach the process thoughtfully, though, bringing an understanding of AI’s strengths and limitations, AI can help focus your attention and lead you to the answers you seek.
“You should treat the AI as an amazing first step for this kind of search,” advised John Licato, an associate professor at the Bellini College of AI, Cybersecurity, and Computing at USF.
There are over 3,600 colleges and universities in the United States, and your ultimate objective is to choose just one. Chances are, when it’s time to make the final decision, it will be easy, but that moment is far away. Right now, you may not even know where to start, but this is where AI excels.
Plan on using AI to:
Quickly analyze enormous amounts of information
Generate an initial college list by filtering out most incompatible options
Help identify schools based on your areas of interest
Create structured comparisons between schools
Suggest questions you may not have thought of on your own
Answer “silly,” “awkward” questions you might not want a recruiter to hear
Correctly used, AI can provide personalized results and lend structure to your college search.
Use AI to find good leads you can move forward with. Once you do, turn elsewhere to help you make sense of what you’ve found.
Your first college search objective is to filter the whole scope of options into a few strong possibilities. This is your brainstorming stage. You probably won’t find your one true college fit right now, but you’ll be a lot closer.
Prompt the AI to identify colleges based on criteria that matter to you, like:
Degree programs offered
The information you get here will inform every subsequent step of your search.
As a starting point, consider using prompts like these:
"Suggest Florida universities with strong marine biology programs.”
“What are the top-ranked pre-med programs in the Southeast?”
“Which universities have a good basketball team and strong Greek life?”
Once you have a list of schools that generally match your goals, dig into the details. AI can help you investigate:
Academic fit
Your objective is to compare the schools to discover things you like and dislike about each one. Ask AI to rank schools based on different metrics, and decide which criteria matter most to you.
At this stage, consider using prompts like these:
Increasingly, research universities like USF offer experiential learning opportunities for students as early as freshman year. Licato mentioned this as another exciting use case for AI in college search.
“You can tell AI what you want to work on,” he explained. “Ask it to look at the specific research of the professors at a university to see which of them are a good fit. That can help you narrow down your search and reveal additional research areas you weren’t aware of.”
But research papers can be complex, dense, and difficult for high school students to understand. Licato has considered this: “If a person's research looks interesting, but you don't really understand it, you can ask AI to read some of their papers, translate, and write summaries for you explaining what their research actually is, which bridges that understanding gap.”
Use that new understanding to start an informed dialogue with researchers you admire. Licato, an active researcher who holds a Ph.D. in computer science, enjoys receiving emails from students who show genuine interest in his work.
“It shows that students understand that selecting a university requires you to look at the specific professors you’re going to work with. I think this could be a good thing,” he said.
Make sure you write outreach messages yourself. Handing that job over to AI sends the wrong signal. It shows you’re using AI to avoid human interaction, not expedite it.
AI research should not be the final step of your college search. At this stage, change your approach. Your objective is to take ownership of your future and put in the work.
“This is an important decision,” Licato said. “You're picking a place that you’ll be associated with for the rest of your life. It is going to shape your education, career, friendships, and network. You want to be deeply involved in the research and decision-making process.”
By now, AI has helped you identify a few great college options. You’ve got an idea of the opportunities each offers, but you don’t have the full picture yet. Before you make any decisions, do the following:
Explore college websites and marketing materials.
Attend open houses and information sessions.
Schedule a campus tour.
Ask current students about their experience.
Talk to admissions recruiters.
Speak with your counselor.
This stage is all about you — and that feeling in your gut when you know you’re making the right decision. AI can’t tell you where you’ll feel at home like a campus tour can. It can’t describe the vibes of a campus in as much detail as students or alumni. It can’t predict your experience at a given school because it doesn’t know you like you do.
Don’t hesitate to ask people for help. Every school on your list has experienced professionals ready to answer your questions and help you through difficult decisions. AI is useful, but it’s no substitute for informed human perspectives — especially when you’re sad or anxious.
You can still use AI at this stage to suggest questions to ask or to help plan visits, but it should be a tool for facilitating real-world interaction and critical thinking, not replacing them.
At this stage, consider using prompts like these:
“Learning how to sniff out hallucinations is such an important foundational skill for interacting with AI,” Licato said. “It's one of the first things I teach in my courses.” Overall, models are improving, but not every model is getting better at avoiding every kind of hallucination.
Be especially cautious of information known to change over time, like rankings, statistics, and especially deadlines. Information about facilities and degree programs should be more reliable. In either case, don’t be afraid to challenge the AI.
Licato offered two powerful questions that can completely level up the way you interact with AI:
Are you sure?
He advised students to respond to AI’s specific claims about a university's policy or statistics with these challenges. Ask for a link to the page where AI found the information. You can even have it point to the specific text it’s referencing on the page. You may be surprised how it responds.
“Often, the AI will say, ‘You know what? On a second read, it doesn't actually say that.’ And it will correct itself,” Licato said.
Even absent suspicion, clicking through to read the source links yourself is the best practice. “You might find mistakes, but you might also find more information than you initially thought to search for,” Licato observed. “It is always good to ask those two questions.”
Licato directs the Advancing Machine and Human Reasoning Lab. The lab studies human problem solving and compares it to the way AI approaches the task, seeking to improve both. Based on this background, we asked Licato for his model recommendations:
ChatGPT: A jack of all trades but master of none. It’s a good place to start.
Claude: Best for complex reasoning and interpreting dense documents.
Perplexity: Best for deep research. It can thoroughly explore any question you give it, but that feature may have a significant monetary cost.
He also commented on the dedicated college search AI tools that are advertised. Some are shallow: You pay a vendor for answers, but they just ask ChatGPT. You could have done that yourself!
Other tools are more thoughtful. Ultimately, they also depend on ChatGPT or Claude, but they place guardrails around the AI models. This ensures that the AI only considers specific, trusted sources and provides more effective answers.
How can you tell which is which? “Unfortunately, it probably is true that the more expensive a tool is, the more thorough it is,” Licato said with a shrug.
Luckily, placing your own guardrails around AI models is free. Here’s how: If you notice a mistake, instruct your AI model to never make that kind of mistake again. Your demand will be incorporated into its code. The more you do this, the better the AI learns your preferences.
Sandra González-Moore, the College, Career, and Military Readiness Coordinator at Palo Duro High School in Amarillo, Texas, has observed her students treating AI like a personal assistant, rather than a search engine.
“They primarily use AI to streamline initial research, including generating target lists based on specific criteria,” she said. Her students also use AI for side-by-side comparisons of colleges.
She encourages this brainstorming approach, but provides specific guidance:
Don't over-rely on the accuracy of AI.
Treat AI like any unverified online source.
Cross-check critical information against the official university websites (.edu).
Licato had similar advice. “You need to educate yourself on AI literacy so you can reduce problems like hallucination, sycophantism [sucking up to the user], and bias.”
Understanding these principles is foundational to effective AI use, he said. “AI is not magic. It doesn’t know everything. It makes mistakes. It’s a tool that can be used incorrectly, just like any other tool.”
AI is still relatively new on the college search scene, but it shows a lot of promise. According to a 2026 EAB report, AI use in college search is trending sharply upwards. It’s “shaping first impressions, helping families narrow their options, and influencing real enrollment decisions, often before a college ever has direct contact with a prospective applicant.”
When you understand AI’s strengths and weaknesses and don’t over-rely on it, it can save you a lot of time and frustration. Should a college or university catch your eye, remember to click through and explore their website.
If you’re interested in attending USF, start with our Freshman Admissions Information page. It’s loaded with useful information and written with you in mind!