CollegeVine’s new AI tool shows the future of college admissions is already here.

As competition for students intensifies, colleges are adopting AI to streamline admissions, personalize outreach, and manage large applicant pools. This trend reflects a growing reliance on technology to navigate the complexities of student recruitment and maximize limited resources.

Why AI Recruiting Is Necessary

CollegeVine’s AI recruiter reaches out to an institution’s prospective students, building relationships with them and guiding them through the admissions process. The AI recruiter is the latest offering from the company to help institutions manage the entire funnel.

“Schools are having to talk to more and more students early in their journey to actually get to the point where they have an incoming class of 500 or 1,000 students,” said Vinay Bhaskara, CollegeVine’s co-founder and head of strategy. “The recruiter was really born to help combat that dissonance and break through the staleness of a status quo that was getting worse for students and worse for institutions year after year.”

Bhaskara’s pitch to institutions is straightforward: multiply staff efficiency by using the AI recruiter to handle hundreds of thousands of prospective students.

“The AI recruiter is going to introduce itself to each of the prospective students in an institution’s funnel. It’s going to pair one-on-one with them, and then it’s going to personally nurture them through the enrollment journey—from the prospect stage all the way to inquiry or application. At which point, the recruiter will pass them back to core staff for the last leg of nurturing,” he said.  

The recruiter also alleviates what he described as the “staffing crisis” in admissions. Smaller institutions with fewer resources could benefit the most from the AI recruiter, he noted. 

“They have a funnel that’s way too big for their limited staff resources. Maybe it’s 50,000 names that they’re trying to communicate with and five or six staff members,” he said.  “The AI recruiter can individualize every piece of communication that a student gets from an institution across email, print, mail and SMS,” he said.

The starting point for the AI recruiter is high five figures, Bhaskara said, but it scales up from there. 

“Compare this to the price of traditional student search marketing contracts, it’s a heck of a lot more affordable and you’re getting better value,” he said.

Sending the AI to School

To use the recruiter, institutions participate in a six-week training process that requires 15-20 hours of institutional staff time, during which they feed the recruiter the institution’s websites and marketing materials. Then, because the recruiter has voice capabilities, it conducts interviews with faculty, staff and students to fill out its intangible knowledge of the institution. 

“You want the recruiter to be an expert, but you also want it to be able to thoughtfully answer questions about what it’s like living on campus and if the dining halls are good,” Bhaskara said.

As of the middle of June, 25 institutions were training their AI recruiters, and another 25 started training at the end of the month. Among the first were Knox College, an Illinois-based private liberal arts school experiencing enrollment decline, and Belmont University, a Nashville-based Christian school with an overstretched admissions team.

If AI Talks, Will Students Listen?

The voice capabilities, Bhaskara said, are particularly useful because the recruiter can answer the phone after hours and on weekends when students and their families have time to work on their applications. 

Nathan Ament, Knox’s vice president of enrollment, saw this as an opportunity to work the top of the funnel, especially with interested international students. 

“Institutions that serve diverse populations appreciate that the voice capabilities can be used in the 30 most common non-English languages spoken in the US,” added Bhaskara.

Questions of whether the use of AI will turn off prospective students don’t resonate with Ament, who believes they will like that they aren’t initially dealing with another person. 

“What I’ve seen anecdotally in the demos is that all that fear goes out the window when they know they’re talking to an AI,’” he said, noting students may be afraid to say something wrong to a counselor. 

In demonstrations, Knox College’s “Sarah” immediately starts calls by noting that she is an AI recruiter, which Bhaskara said is important in terms of transparency. The program then says, “I’m calling to learn a bit more about your college preferences and help you decide if Knox could be a good fit. What’s most important to you and your college decision?” From there, Sarah listens before responding with the appropriate information. 

According to Bhaskara, the recruiter’s ability to answer roughly 98% of student questions “speeds up the velocity of how quickly students can get access to the information they need.”

Reallocation of Limited Resources

Lindsey Hurst, Belmont’s director of enrollment marketing and communications, hopes to use CollegeVine’s AI to free up her staff. Instead of constantly responding to general inquiries, they can instead work one-on-one with prospects who are interested in specifics, such as classes and campus culture.

Ament insists that the recruiter will simply augment Knox’s current staff, not replace them. 

“I’ve been purposeful about telling my staff, no, this is just going to be another tool,” he said. “It’s just going to make your life easier and going to enable you to interact with students that really do have a true interest in Knox. This is a human profession, and there is no reason to get rid of the humans.”

Assimilation into Culture

Ament and Hurst have been impressed by the training process, and both noted the recruiter’s adaptability to institutional personality. 

“We were able to specifically outline how we wanted the AI recruiter to sound and speak to our students,” said Hurst.

Ament added, “Students at Knox don’t use formal salutations like ‘doctor,’ so I will dial it back and probably have it be more casual than other institutions.”

He’s also excited by how it can be adjusted over time as it consumes more information. 

“We’re going to have the recruiter train with every one of our counselors. Six of our admissions counselors are based regionally in Texas, St. Louis, Chicago and Denver,” said Ament. “It can answer things like how you get from Denver to Galesburg. It’s about trying to get it to answer questions that you can’t necessarily find on a website.”

As Belmont’s AI recruiter launches, Hurst will be looking for results throughout the admissions funnel to determine whether it’s worth renewing with CollegeVine again next year. 

“Looking at how many students had CollegeVine as their first source for being part of our admissions funnel will be telling,” she said. “How many of these students actually deposited and said they were coming to Belmont and ended up enrolling?”

AI’s Continued Evolution

“We can see a pretty big role eventually for agentic AI capabilities in advancements and student success and retention once the AI recruiter has matured and is fully built out,” Bhaskara said.

Ultimately, he sees the recruiter as a way to enfranchise more students. 

“The AI recruiter unlocks the ability to do things like call a student,” said Bhaskara. “You call a student that has a partially completed application and get the rest of their application filled out while they’re taking the bus.”