From the AI Proving Ground to College Planning: Using AI to Simplify the Process

This post is part of our Everyday AI series crafted by WWT AI experts to enhance awareness and comfort with Generative AI (GenAI). Our goal is to empower you to harness GenAI's diverse capabilities and benefits, both professionally and personally. 

College planning is a stressful and often daunting task for most teenagers coming of age, but also for the parents who are guiding them. As most people can relate, most of us coming out of high school probably want to go to college but have no idea what they want to major in, where they want to go, or how they will pay for it. 

Now, this blog is not going to give you answers for all of them, and neither is AI. What AI can do is help you get off the ground floor. AI is another tool in your belt, and we are going to dive in and show you how we used this tool to help us with some of the processes.

Our questions and AI's answers:

We started by gathering a list of questions that we were going to ask different AI chatbots, specifically Gemini and Microsoft Copilot. We did this mainly to avoid accepting the first answer and instead gather information from several sources for a better decision. We're using AI as a comparison tool, not solely relying on it for answers. We also attended group sessions discussing college, school counselors, etc., to maximize our understanding and gain relevant information.  

In his journey, we asked at least 50 different questions, not only to the chatbots but also to our in-person meetings, and I will say that AI was really close to its human counterparts on a lot of the answers. One thing to take away from this is that a Chatbot, just like talking to a person, is only as good as the data it is privileged to have/has access to.

As Chirag mentioned in his article about using AI to plan a Health and fitness routine, it starts with a detailed prompt/questions. The more detailed your question is, typically, the better the results will be. For the content of this article, we are going to stick with some questions I had as a parent around FAFSA. My son had more personal questions and showed the way in which both chatbots answered them.

• Should we get the FAFSA application on the day it goes live?
• Does it pay to get it earlier?
• When is the last day I can submit for the FAFSA?
• What is the latest day you recommend applying for FAFSA?

We are going to start with the straightforward questions around FAFSA planning first to see how close the two different chatbot responses are to each other. The theory is that this should be close to the same response as this information is readily available on the web.

Microsoft Copilot answers

Google Gemini answers

Summation of general questions

Most of the responses are pretty much in line with each other. They both call out the correct deadlines and tell you to submit as early as possible. From our experience with counselors and our group planning sessions, this pretty much matches up. The one thing we liked about Microsoft CoPilot is that it asked us a question in return. Keeping the conversation going and driving us to think of other things, like "Would you like me to help with creating reminders or even creating a checklist for this?"

More personalized questions

Now we are going to move on to what I would call more personal questions. These questions came from my 17-year-old son. Again, these are not all the questions he asked, just a few examples.

• For college, if I don't have the ACT score I want, but I still apply to a school, can I take an ACT test and replace that score after I apply?
• If I go to a big SEC college like Mizzou, what is the best way to come out of college without being in tons of debt?
• What are easy scholarships that I can apply for, too?

Microsoft Copilot answers

Google Gemini answers

Summation of personalized questions

In this case, you can see that both AIs give similar answers to the questions that he asked. But in this case, we feel like Gemini had a more detailed response in some areas. We both found it amusing that both AIs gave the answer of working a part-time job. Seriously, though, it gave crisp, good ideas for him to take action on and provided sources for him to investigate further.

Additional AI assistance

As my son and I got more comfortable with the results, questions were not the only thing that we asked both AIs to help with. These initial conversations spawned much more detailed requests.  Here are a few examples of what they assisted with next.

• College Sports Resumes - what to include, how to format, when to submit.
• Generate a spreadsheet that includes schools a,b, and c—average tuition, financial aid deadline, minimum ATC score, if any, email of baseball coaches, names of coaches, whether freshmen have to live in dorms their first year (y/n), whether freshmen can have a car, and the parking fee.
• Overall scholarship submission format and starter ideas

Additional AI assistance examples

As you can see, it created a relatively simple document for this resume and the spreadsheet, but that was really based on the information provided. It can be as personal and detailed as the information you allow it to have.

Now we are showing examples of what can be done in your personal life, but think of the times you had to get a spreadsheet or something created for a task at work. Most likely, you created all of those by hand and spent a good portion of time getting the data in and creating what you want. Let AI help where it can. If your company allows you to use Copilot like WWT and has access to the data, it can help you with creating simple to even complex words, resumes, spreadsheets, etc.

Closing it out

Again, we did not take AI's results verbatim; it was a tool to offset and help not only guide but speed up the process. Not every answer was perfect, but it did help us both work together to find the answers to our original questions and branch us off into new directions that we may not have even considered. In the end, the more tools you have to leverage, the better and easier the job becomes.