If we are to believe the current rapturous cheerleading around artificial intelligence, education is about to be transformed. Digital educators, alert and available at all times, will soon replace their human counterparts and feed students with concentrated personalized content.
It’s reminiscent of a troubling experiment from the 1960s, immortalized in one touching image: an infant monkey, clearly scared, clutching a crude cloth replica of the real mother it has been deprived of. Next to it is a roll of metal mesh with a feeding bottle attached. The metal mom supplies milk, while the cloth mom sits inert. And yet, in moments of stress, it is the latter the infant seeks succor from.
Notwithstanding its distressing provenance, this image has bearing on a topical question: What role should AI play in our children’s education? And in school counseling? Here’s one way to think about these questions.
With its detached efficiency, an AI system is like the metal mesh mother — capable of delivering information, but little else. Human educators — the teachers and the school counselors with whom students build emotional bonds and relationships of trust — are like the cloth mom.
It would be a folly to replace these educators with digital counterparts. We don’t need to look very far back to validate this claim. Just over a decade ago, we were gripped by the euphoria around MOOCs — educational videos accessible to all via the Internet.
“The end of classroom education!” “An inflection point!” screamed breathless headlines. The reality turned out to be a lot less impressive.
MOOCs wound up playing a helpful supporting role in education, but the stars of the show remained the human teachers; in-person learning environments turned out to be essential. The failures of remote learning during Covid support the same conclusion. A similar narrative likely will (and we argue, ought to) play out in the context of AI and school counseling.
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Guidance for our children must keep caring adults at its core. Counselors play an indispensable role in helping students find their paths through the school maze. Their effectiveness is driven by their expertise, empathy and ability to be confidants to students in moments of doubt and stress.
At least, that is how counseling is supposed to work. In reality, the counseling system is under severe stress.
The American School Counselor Association recommends a student-to-counselor ratio of 250-to-1, yet the actual average was 385-to-1 for the 2022–23 school year, the most recent year for which data is available. In many schools the ratio is far higher.
Even for the most dedicated counselor, such a ratio makes it impossible to spend much time getting to know any one student; the counselor has to focus on administrative work like schedule changes and urgent issues like mental health. This constraint on availability has cascading effects, limiting the counselor’s ability to personalize advice and recommendations.
Students sense that their counselors are rushed or occupied with other crises and feel hesitant to ask for more advice and support from these caring adults. Meanwhile, the counselors are assigned extraneous tasks like lunch duty and attendance support, further scattering their attention.
Against this dispiriting backdrop, it is tempting to turn to AI as a savior. Can’t generative AI systems be deployed as virtual counselors that students can interact with and get recommendations from? As often as they want? On any topic? Costing a fraction of the $60,000 annual salary of a typical human school counselor?
Given the fantastic recent leaps in the capabilities of AI systems, answers to all these questions appear to be a resounding yes: There is a compelling case to be made for having AI play a role in school counseling. But it is not one of replacement.
AI’s ability to process vast amounts of data and offer personalized recommendations makes it well-suited for enhancing the counseling experience. By analyzing data on a student’s personality and interests, AI can facilitate more meaningful interactions between the student and their counselor and lay the groundwork for effective goal setting.
AI also excels at breaking down complex tasks into manageable steps, turning goals into action plans. This work is often time-consuming for human counselors, but it’s easy for AI, making it an invaluable ally in counseling sessions.
By leveraging AI to augment traditional approaches, counselors can allocate more time to providing critical social and emotional support and fostering stronger mentorship relationships with students.
Incorporating AI into counseling services also brings long-term benefits: AI systems can track recommendations and student outcomes, and thus continuously improve system performance over time. Additionally, AI can stay abreast of emerging trends in the job market so that counselors can offer students cutting-edge guidance on future opportunities.
And AI add-ons are well-suited to provide context-specific suggestions and information — such as for courses and local internships — on an as-needed basis and to adapt to a student’s changing interests and goals over time.
As schools grapple with declining budgets and chronic absenteeism, the integration of AI into counseling services offers a remarkable opportunity to optimize counseling sessions and establish support systems beyond traditional methods.
Still, it is an opportunity we must approach with caution. Human counselors serve an essential and irreplaceable role in helping students learn about themselves and explore college and career options. By harnessing the power of AI alongside human strengths, counseling services can evolve to meet the diverse needs of students in a highly personalized, engaging and goal-oriented manner.
Izzat Jarudi is co-founder and CEO of Edifii, a startup offering digital guidance assistance for high school students and counselors supported by the U.S. Department of Education’s SBIR program. Pawan Sinha is a professor of neuroscience and AI at MIT and Edifii’s co-founder and chief scientist. Carolyn Stone, past president of the American School Counselor Association, contributed to this piece.
This story about AI and school counselors was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s newsletter.
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