Admissions offices have been rolling out new technologies that use artificial intelligence (AI) to engage with or evaluate prospective students. But experts and enrollment professionals point out that AI holds the power to close equity gaps as much as augment them, depending on how these emerging tools are used.
“When you’re using AI, you’re usually asking the data to find out what you have said is important based on the data that is in your possession,” said Dr. Kirsten Martin, a professor of technology and ethics at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza School of Business. “The key is the data that I have in my possession. Data is not clean of the sins of the past.”
Martin noted how the same AI program could reduce or reinforce biases to recruit students in admissions. A program, for example, could find high schools in marginalized communities that a university has not reached out to historically. That way offices can recruit more students from underrepresented backgrounds.
Adrienne Amador Oddi, vice president of strategic enrollment and communications at Queens University of Charlotte
“But the exact same program could be used to find students who can save the college money, not increase diversity, if you ask who is expensive to admit and who is not,” she said. “So, you could find students at boarding schools in the Northeast who your program maybe historically says don’t use as many expensive academic support services on campus.”
Adrienne Amador Oddi, vice president of strategic enrollment and communications at Queens University of Charlotte, agreed that admissions inequalities can be heightened or mitigated depending on how AI technology is used.
“The whole admissions process can be reimagined in a more inclusive way. Each year, we get a bit better. But we code inequality in new terms,” said Oddi, who pointed out that anonymizing student information with AI can help reduce subconscious human biases in reviewers.
That coded inequality could come up when assessing curricular rigor for a student despite needs-blind admissions. If the student attends a lesser-resourced high school without as many advanced placement classes, then curricular rigor would appear differently than a student at a wealthy high school with several advanced classes.
