When I was a graduate student at Boston College School of Education, I was privileged to learn from some of the finest researchers, writers, and educators in the field, including Drs. Polly Ulichny, Tom Keating, Marilyn Cochran-Smith, Walt Haney, and Otherine Neisler. They all taught and role-modeled the importance of making personal biases about a subject as transparent as possible from the outset. In that spirit, I confess a clear bias about the topic at hand:
I love technology in general, and educational technology in particular.
It’s an affinity that goes way back. One of my abiding childhood dreams was to live in the Jetsons’ world—a space-age, tech-driven place even more wondrous than Disney World.
My most memorable elementary school year was fifth grade, when calculators burst into classrooms and reformed STEM teaching and learning despite vociferous protestations that they would ruin students’ mathematical thinking—starting with their ability to add, subtract, multiply, and divide. Turns out, however, that for the vast majority of students, calculators had the opposite effect: what the techo-naysayers neglected to calculate—see what I did there?—is that for every student who becomes dependent on a calculator and never learns their times tables, countless others are empowered by that same device to solve complex, often more realistic, math problems previously beyond their ability even to conceive. That’s exciting stuff in the world of education!
Equipped with a Radio Shack TRS-80—a first-generation, monochromatic, MS-DOS, cassette-driven desktop—in high school, an 18-lb “portable” Osbourne computer in college, and an early Apple laptop in graduate school, I also lived through the advent of personal and networked computers in secondary and higher education. As calculators had reshaped math education, computer technology proved even more transformative across the curriculum.
Based on these lived experiences, I was a proponent of technology in education long before collecting dissertation data on high school teachers’ early uses of the internet. In my work today, I luxuriate in Google Classroom, Zoom, whiteboards, and access to all kinds of web-based tools, from collaboration utilities to Desmos to the complete works of Shakespeare . It’s not quite the Jetsons, but it’s starting to feel more like it every year.
Enter AI, which may actually get us all to the Jetsons.
Add to Desmos AI’s ability to explain to individual students each step in the creation of a graph, and even help pinpoint that one step they always seem to miss. Add to the complete work of Shakespeare AI’s ability to bring to life and explain Hamlet’s great speeches from any number of perspectives. Add to the internet’s vast storehouse of information AI’s ability to personify Euclid and Michelangelo and MLK in convincing detail based on an unfathomable amount of data to engage students in direct conversation and answer their questions.
Perhaps best of all, when it comes to learning how to write—one of the most challenging and important skills to take to college—no longer do students have to rely on luck and getting the rare and special teachers who take the time to write specific, detailed comments about their ideas as well as grammar, style, diction, and the structure of sentences, paragraphs, and the essay overall. Giving detailed, accurate and immediate feedback on both form and content is one of the things AI does best.
The potential for AI to level up everyone’s college preparatory education can hardly be overstated.
Nevertheless, just as calculators had many early detractors, so too does AI. Many are concerned that students will use AI to do their work for them and not with them (Sal Khan, How AI Could Save (Not Destroy) Education), encouraging cheating and depriving students of learning experiences they might have without it. Nevertheless, my experience over the past few years has proved otherwise. For every student who asks an AI bot to compose an essay from scratch for a school assignment, many others will use the very same tool to see and understand different ways a piece of writing can be constructed and how voice and tone, as well as meaning, are created through language. AI will make it possible for every student to see how essay structure, grammar rules, diction, sentence structure, and punctuation apply to their own writing. See also AI in Schools: Cheater or Tutor? (Paul Matthews).
When it comes to writing college applications, it may be tempting to ask an AI bot to write a personal essay from scratch based on a few salient features of your high school career, or a supplement essay on good reasons why someone would want to attend University XYZ, and AI can quickly produce impressive looking and nice smelling responses to both prompts—but they won’t get anyone into competitive schools. The reason is that no matter how well a writing tool captures the points you were hoping it would, and no matter how polished and elegant the mechanics and syntax, it will fail to create a picture of your authentic self, and that is a college application dealbreaker in 2025.
If AI excels at pattern recognition, rhetorical analysis, and clarity of expression based on the mega-data that powers it, it is far less adept at original thinking, creativity, and emotional intelligence, all of which are necessary to produce applications that sound like real students and capture the attention of admissions committees. Even if you could input every detail of your life from birth to senior year in high school, AI could crank out 1000 different essays, each of which would weave together events that make you sound college-ready, focused, and smart.
But, but, but, AI can never know which events YOU would choose, or why—in short, it won’t pass the authenticity test (especially if thousands of other applicants are using the same tools for the same purpose). Essays AI produces will ultimately sound generic and you will come off two-dimensional. And that won’t get admissions officers excited about your candidacy. They want to picture real people on their real campus.
Successful applications are not always those with the greatest number of impressive accolades, but those that manage to convey a real and authentic human being—a particular individual with unique experiences, ideas, values, perspectives, motivations, goals, and dreams.
Students applying to competitive schools in the age of AI may well, and probably should, use AI writing tools, in much the same way they likely use a spell or grammar checker, but they will create a personal narrative out of their own heads, hearts, and souls. Only real students can convey a real sense of self. Those who accomplish that personal task make it much easier for admissions officers to see them on their campuses and to send acceptance letters.
Related post: 4 Reasons Why It’s Important to Tell the Truth and How It Can Get You Into Collegea
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