Joie’s Newsletter #6
ChatGPT Told My Son He's Getting Into an Ivy Based on His 9th Grade Grades.
A few weeks ago I came downstairs for dinner and my son looked up from his phone.
"Mom," he said, "ChatGPT says I have an 80 percent chance of getting into [insert name of school with four percent acceptance rate]."
I sat down. "Interesting. What data did you give it?"
"My ninth grade grades."
My son. The child who has watched me do this work his entire life, who has heard me explain admissions nuances at the very same dinner table more times than either of us can count, who literally lives with a college admissions expert. And he still could not resist asking AI to hand him the answer he was hoping for.
I was not mad. I was fascinated. Because it tells you a lot about what AI is actually doing to people emotionally in this process right now, and why I felt compelled to talk about it publicly when The New York Times reached out a few weeks ago for an interview.
The piece, “Hey ChatGPT, Where Should I Go to College?”, captured something I see often: families who have every resource at their disposal turning to a chatbot at midnight because it is always available, never judges them, and tells them exactly what they want to hear. However, as I told the reporter, the only guess that matters in this process is a truly educated one. If you have read thousands of applications, you develop a feel for how people actually get in that no algorithm has figured out how to replicate.
Here is the part that may get lost in this conversation: I am not anti-AI. Not even close. At CP360, we have spent serious time understanding where these tools genuinely help and where they mislead, and we are integrating them thoughtfully into our work. They are genuinely useful for some research and organizing timelines, aspects of our work that used to eat up hours. We use AI for these kinds of tasks at CP360, and we are glad we do.
But there is a whole category of our work that AI has not come close to touching, and it happens to be the most important part. Knowing when a student needs a little push to aim higher. Hearing the shift in a teenager's voice when they talk about an award they won, an internship they earned, or a cause they are fighting for. Understanding what an admissions officer responds to that never shows up in data. That is still a human job.
I also know that not every student has a human in their corner. The ratio of counselors to students at most public high schools makes real guidance almost impossible, and for many families, a chatbot is the only advisor they have access to. That genuinely makes me sad. It also reminds me why our work matters as much as it does.
And it is not just public schools that are stretched thin. Even at the best prep schools in the country, counselors are managing dozens of seniors at once during the most critical months of the process. The one-on-one time is limited, and the planning runway is almost never as long as it needs to be. High school students need someone who truly knows them and is in their college-planning corner. We do not take that responsibility lightly.
My own son, to his credit, took the news about his real admissions odds like a champ. I made some cheesy jokes, and he humored me with a good laugh. And then we had a sincere conversation about what actually goes into this, which was probably the point all along.
Education expert, founder, author of “B+ Grades, A+ College Application.”
