Every year, admissions officers at universities across the country make life-changing decisions about students they’ve never met. They aren’t evaluating students directly. They’re evaluating representations of students. Personal data. Essays. Activities. Recommendations. Interviews.
Similarly, prospective students rarely experience a university in its entirety before deciding where to enroll. They rely on websites, campus tours, rankings, marketing materials, social media, and conversations with current students.
Higher education has always depended on representations. Students represent themselves to institutions, and institutions represent themselves to students. With AI now part of the picture, that reality hasn’t changed, but it is now easier than ever to skew those representations to present yourself in the best light. That invites us to think more carefully about the relationship between the story and the experience behind it.
Higher education has long rewarded the ability to communicate compellingly. Students who could tell their stories well have had an advantage in admissions. Institutions that communicated their value effectively stood out in an increasingly competitive market.
Today, compelling communication is no longer a scarce skill. With the right prompt, almost anyone can produce polished prose, thoughtful organization, and persuasive language.
That shift has prompted an uncomfortable question: If compelling communication is now available to everyone, what does it still tell us?
In college admissions, the question often becomes: if students use AI to help them write essays, prepare for interviews, and refine their applications, can admissions officers still see the person behind the application? It’s an important question. But it rests on a deeper assumption: that polished communication has always been a reliable window into truth. I’m not convinced it ever was.
The Difference Between Experience and Representation
AI now touches nearly every part of the college application process. It can brainstorm and help write essays, refine activity descriptions, prepare students for interviews, and give students suggestions on how to make their materials stand out. What it cannot do is live the life being represented.
A student might use AI to describe a leadership experience more clearly. But AI didn’t organize the fundraiser, captain the debate team, care for younger siblings, or spend Saturday mornings volunteering. Those experiences obviously belong to the student. A student using the technology ethically is using it to get their stories across more clearly – not to invent one.
The same distinction applies to institutions. AI can help a university communicate its culture, highlight student outcomes, and explain its mission more effectively. It should not be used to create a campus culture that doesn’t exist or manufacture outcomes students never achieved.
Much of the public conversation has focused on the ethics of AI itself. But regardless of where one stands on that debate, AI has brought another ethical question into sharper focus: How do we know when a solid representation actually reflects the person or institution behind it?
Long before generative AI, students worked with parents, teachers, essay coaches, private counselors, and test-prep tutors. Institutions worked with marketing agencies, copywriters, photographers, designers, and consultants. None of those relationships were inherently unethical. The ethical question was never whether someone received help expressing a story. It was whether the resulting story remained an honest representation of the person or institution behind it.
AI didn’t invent curated narratives. It simply made sophisticated communication accessible to far more people, far more quickly.
If our concern is honesty, then let’s talk about honesty. If our concern is fairness, let’s talk about who has always had greater access to support. But let’s stop treating the mechanism as the problem. The question has always been the same: Does the representation reflect reality?
The Better Questions
If the ethical question is whether a representation still reflects reality, then the next question is what evidence should we actually value.
Polished communication has served as a proxy for qualities we care about. A thoughtful essay suggested maturity. Strong institutional marketing implied a vibrant student experience. We often assumed that if someone could tell a persuasive story, there was probably substance behind it. I think AI weakens that assumption.
When compelling communication becomes widely available, it loses much of its value as a differentiator. The ability to produce polished language is no longer rare enough to tell us very much on its own.
That changes what admissions should be looking for. Instead of asking whether an essay sounds impressive, admissions professionals can ask whether it demonstrates genuine reflection. Instead of rewarding the most polished narrative, they can look for specificity, consistency, and evidence that experiences were actually lived. The question shifts from How well is this story told? to What does this story reveal about the person who lived it?
Enrollment marketing faces the same challenge. For years, institutions competed by telling increasingly compelling stories about themselves. But as AI makes persuasive messaging accessible to everyone, I am finding that language itself becomes less distinctive.
Institutions can no longer rely on sounding exceptional. They have to create experiences worth talking about and then tell those stories in ways that remain true to what the students will encounter.
The competitive advantage shifts away from polish and toward substance: student experiences that can be verified, outcomes that can be demonstrated, communities that genuinely exist, and promises that match reality. As AI makes compelling communication more accessible, the experiences behind that communication matter even more.
Judgment Still Belongs to Humans
The final distinction may be the most important one: using AI is not the same thing as outsourcing judgment. Students may use AI to organize ideas, get feedback, or improve their writing. Admissions offices may use it to summarize data, draft communications and streamline operations. Marketing teams may use it to generate campaign ideas and refine messaging. In every case, the technology can support the work, but it cannot decide what is meaningful, what is ethical, or what is true. Those remain human responsibilities.
That shifts the work. For admissions professionals, the task becomes looking beyond polished prose for evidence of reflection, specificity, and experiences that ring true. For enrollment marketers, the challenge is remarkably similar. As AI makes polished messaging accessible to everyone, polish itself loses value. What differentiates an institution is no longer how compelling it sounds, but whether the stories it tells are rooted in genuine student experiences, measurable outcomes, and promises it can actually keep.
AI is becoming part of how students write, how institutions communicate, and how work gets done across higher education. That reality is unlikely to reverse. The responsibility, then, is not to determine whether AI was involved in every interaction. It is to exercise good judgment about whether an application, a message, or a marketing campaign remains a faithful reflection of the person or institution behind it.
