I initially went to junior college to get an AA in Merchandising before going off to a university which was still within driving distance. Junior college was enough like high school and relatively small so that the change wasn’t bad, but university was different. I used to have nightmares about not being able to find my classroom because I took a diverse number of classes that were nowhere near each other. Navigating all of the university services was also a huge learning experience for me. I’ve never been that good at asking for directions, and with everyone rushing around in a similar panic, it wasn’t like there was a ton of help from my fellow classmates.
Thus, when I saw that IBM plans to use watsonx as an AI-Powered Student Concierge at Penn State, it struck a chord with me. I never really got a student advisor, and it would have been a godsend to have some kind of dedicated service keeping me focused and less stressed. I can’t imagine what it would have been like if, on top of all of this, I had to move to a new location for my advanced education like many of you did. At least I could go back to something familiar when the school day was over.
The Importance of a School Concierge
I was going to add “for college” in the subtitle above, but I moved around a lot when I was younger. I had gone to nine schools both public and private by the time I graduated high school, and each transition was extremely painful, particularly in 8th grade where I lived at the school and didn’t even get to go home except for holidays. That one year was a pain. I had detention for four hours every night and detention for up to 16 hours on weekends (if you were an A student, which I wasn’t, you’d get half of that unless you did really bad; a senior couple got caught kissing and were expelled on the spot). I recall crying a lot that year and feeling abandoned and lost. If I had been able to talk about it candidly and get help to navigate that experience, it would have been a huge help.
We don’t really prepare kids for life away from home whether it is for work or for school. When my father went to Stanford, he discovered a love for partying and he flunked out, ending up in Annapolis which I’m sure was a massive but necessary shock to his system. While 85% of kids make it all the way through highschool, only around 67% of kids make it all the way through college, and that is just a waste of time and money. These numbers came from both public and private schools. Private schools do generally provide more student support, and the result is that a higher percentage of kids make it all the way through.
This suggests that if you were to scale just the support that private schools provide to public schools, graduation rates would improve. Since we don’t typically provide this support in K-12 schools, many students likely don’t use these services and are either unaware of them or uncomfortable with them. An AI concierge could make a huge difference, particularly if the student were introduced to this service the year before going to the college or university that used it. Getting familiar with and comfortable with this tool early would help with early decisions like living on or off campus, which base classes to take, and maybe even advice on career path, sports, or other extra-curricular activities.
That way the student could hit the ground running and would be far more likely to survive the critical first year. Around 19% of college students drop out in the first year, which is nearly 50% of the total dropout rate. Getting kids ready for college would have a huge impact on them finishing.
Wrapping Up:
We have a lot of concerns about AI taking jobs, but certain support roles, like helping students survive college, are understaffed and not well promoted in most schools likely because of the resource limitations. An AI Concierge could make a huge difference for a moderate cost and would have a beneficial revenue impact on schools that lose money and prestige when a student drops out.
One other thing this concierge could do is help students find intern jobs and take classes that better prepare them for work. According to Bing Copilot (Microsoft’s AI), right now around 55% of students are failing in their first job after college within a year. This means we aren’t doing a good enough job of preparing kids for college. A properly trained AI Concierge should be able to reduce that failure rate significantly by both guiding kids to better career choices and helping them better anticipate how different working will be from going to school.
Over time, I expect young adults will have the option of extending this AI service into their professional life to make it more like an AI life coach that would be with them and that they would trust for much of their life. This is a big step in that direction. We are only at the beginning of how AI can, and hopefully will, improve the success rates of our children.
