Student Search Has Quietly Moved Off the Official Path
Why this matters to Wen: higher-ed messaging now has to survive in hidden AI-assisted comparison loops before the institution ever sees the prospect.
of college-bound students reported using AI as a resource when exploring colleges.
EAB's June piece matters because it describes a hidden behaviour change: students are forming impressions in AI conversations adults often never witness.
The Story
EAB's June article sharpens the higher-ed AI story by focusing on what is hard to observe. Students are using AI in their college search, but much of that usage happens outside the formal channels counsellors and institutions can see. The result is that early impressions form in private, prompt-led comparison moments.
That changes the design and content job. It is no longer enough to optimise the official site for the visit you can measure. Institutions need clearer proof, sharper positioning, and cleaner language that can survive being paraphrased by systems and repeated by students who arrived with AI-assisted assumptions already in place.
For Wen, this is immediate workplace relevance. It suggests that recruitment design has expanded upstream. Content has to perform before it is clicked, before it is carefully browsed, and sometimes before the institution even knows the audience has met it.
Studio Wensday Angle
Choose one programme page and ask what a student would carry away if an AI tool compressed it into a shortlist comparison. Fix whatever becomes vague.