Why Is Higher Education Ignoring AI’s Most Obvious Uses?
Students want guidance—Staff could provide it... if colleges let them
I write about leadership and AI, with a focus on why critical thinking about technology matters more than ever.
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Everyone’s talking about using ChatGPT in classrooms, but almost no one is talking about the advising and career offices. That’s a mistake.
Advising caseloads at public universities can be 600–1000 students per advisor. I had a caseload of around a thousand students. And every one of them wanted certainty about the future.
This is where TV ruined everything. If a student watched CSI or Criminal Minds, I could count on seeing them in my office telling me they wanted to be a profiler or work as a crime scene investigator. They pictured themselves in dark rooms with case files, outsmarting criminals as if they were starring in a made-for-television psychological thriller.
The reality of those jobs was much less glamorous. Profiling usually meant the FBI, which required more than a psychology degree and a flair for the dramatic. Forensics meant chemistry, long hours in labs, and not a lot of chase scenes. As soon as I told them, half the time their faces fell with a response somewhere along the lines of “I don’t like chemistry or science.”
Well, then you don’t want to do this job. Now of course I wasn’t quite so blunt with them but eventually we worked our way around to reality.
They thought picking a major was all about preferences. What they liked in high school, how much money they could make, and what seemed interesting on TV. They didn’t understand the layers. How competitive certain fields were. What credentials were actually required.
Or how some popular majors, like criminal justice, might feel aligned with their dream but statistically gave them some of the lowest admissions test scores for law school.
The lure of easy answers
This is where AI could be stepping in. Not to replace advisors, but to prep students before meetings. Imagine if every student had structured prompts to run through:
“What are the actual requirements for this job?”
“How competitive is it to enter this field?”
“What degrees or certifications are essential?”
But just knowing how to ask a question is not enough. You need somebody to help you.
And that’s exactly what the data is telling us. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports that anywhere from a third to nearly all students are using AI for schoolwork and everyday tasks. But Forbes found that 80% have had no formal training, and 70% are asking for clear guidance on how to use these tools responsibly.
Here’s how that plays out when you don’t know how to push for a better response.
I asked ChatGPT, what are the best undergraduate majors to go to law school. It gave me a list saying there are no required majors, but common choices for pre-law students are political science, history, English, philosophy, economics, business, accounting, and criminal justice.
It also mentioned STEM fields like biology, computer science, or engineering, along with psychology and sociology. Then it said, pick a major that you enjoy and will do well in, but also one that helps build strong skills in reading, writing, analysis, and reasoning.
Now, I know a little something about law school because I advised for it. I know there are certain majors that are better than others. So I asked in a different way. I said, which one of those majors helps prepare you the best for the law school admissions test.
The Response:
The law school admissions test is mainly about reading comprehension, logical reasoning, and analytical reasoning. So the majors that prepare you best for that are the ones that sharpen logic and close reading and critical thinking. The top prep majors for the LSAT are philosophy, political science, English, economics, and history.
Then it added, data shows that students who major in philosophy, economics, and math have the highest average LSAT scores.
I already knew this, so I asked another question. I said, I do not see criminal justice on that list. ChatGPT responded, right, and that is actually important. Criminal justice is one of the most popular pre-law majors, but it is not one of the best prep majors for law school or the LSAT. And then it explained why.
Now, I know when I advised pre-law students many of them chose sociology and criminal justice. At that time, those majors actually ranked the lowest in terms of scoring on the LSAT.
If I had stopped at that first prompt, I might have thought criminal justice was fine for preparing for law school. In reality, it is popular but not the strongest preparation for the test or admissions.
That is why AI is not enough on its own. Students need someone to push them to ask the next question and then help them make sense of the answers.
Why a human still matters
This is why I don’t buy the idea that students can just be handed a set of prompts and figure it out. It looks efficient. It looks empowering. But it ignores how students actually work. Even when I gave them clear instructions in person, half of them never followed through. Some didn’t know how. Some were overwhelmed. Some just froze.
A tool like ChatGPT is powerful, but only in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it. Otherwise, it becomes another rabbit hole. I could see myself using it in sessions, then giving students homework: take these prompts, try them out, bring back what you found. And when they returned, we’d sit down together and sift through it.
What questions did you miss?
What answers looked good but weren’t realistic?
Where do we need to dig deeper?
Without that layer of guidance, it’s easy to mistake surface-level answers for insight.
What I wish colleges understood
Most colleges won’t move quickly on this. They’ll debate policies about AI in classrooms, put out stern warnings about cheating, and miss the obvious. ChatGPT could be a huge help in advising and career services. It could make students more prepared, not less.
But the real barrier comes down to staffing.
Advisors already have caseloads that feel impossible. When you’re responsible for hundreds of students that may even tip into 4 digit territory like mine did, you barely have time to check boxes. Deep advising that involves hard questions, back-and-forth conversations, and teaching students how to use tools will fall completely by the wayside.
what it really takes
Many times, college advising gets a bad rap. Personally, I loved the puzzle aspect of it. No two days were the same. Each student came in with their own unique questions, problems, and situations. Many days were a mix of paperwork, crisis management, and long conversations that sometimes went in circles.
The best part was when a student had that aha moment. Not because I told them what to do. But because I helped them push past their resistance or that first, easy answer.
I always used to say advising was one of those thankless professions. We often made a huge impact, sometimes even changed a student’s life, but we rarely heard about it. Once in a while I’d get an email from one expressing gratitude. More often, they just moved on with their lives and we never knew the impact.
Where I came in
For me, helping a student walk out of my office with a real understanding of what steps they needed to make to pursue a particular career meant I did my job. Sometimes they still pursued it. Sometimes they changed their minds. Either way, they had a clearer picture that helped them either keep moving toward their goal or stop and say, wait a minute, I need to switch gears, and fast.
AI can help students get to that point more quickly. But it can’t replace the part where someone sits across from them, listens closely, and says, let’s ask that again, but in a different way.
And it’s not just advising…
Career services could use AI to help students prep resumes, search for internships, or compare grad school requirements.
Writing centers could use it for drafting support, citation checks, and feedback prep.
Tutoring centers could build structured study guides with AI as the starting point.
Disability services could expand accessibility through text-to-speech or structured summaries.
Libraries could use it for research support, database navigation, and citation management.
Even academic support offices could lean on it for study skills and time management workshops.
Most colleges are stuck thinking about AI as a workflow hack for staff. The real missed opportunity is how they could use it to change student outcomes.
© 2025 Bette A. Ludwig: All rights reserved
This is a great article, thank you Bette. We’re are the beginning of a new era (it seems) and there’s a lot we don’t know. I understand AI is so new that there’s a lot of hesitation around its use but we won’t know unless we go in with open minds, try, learn and evolve with it. Theres a lot of use cases where we could fill in some gaps from traditional education.
This is such an important article, Bette. I wish more educators were listening. Sadly a lot of upper management in higher education is hoping AI will get crazy good for them to just replace people because it’s all about cutting costs and making money.