Secure and governed use of AI in admissions
AI can help higher education institutions streamline workflows to be more efficient and scalable. The secure and governed use of AI can take the administrative burden out of admissions processes, supporting universities in enrolling the right students more efficiently. A THE webinar, held in partnership with DreamApply, explored strategies for implementing AI in admissions to turn days of manual review into hours of strategic work.
DreamApply’s application management software helps higher education institutions overcome the challenges they face in admissions and student recruitment. The platform is designed to streamline workflows, improve the applicant experience and reduce application processing time through the secure use of technology. The webinar also featured a live demonstration of DreamApply’s new AI Highlighter tool.
Lauri Elevant, chief technical officer and co-founder of DreamApply, said that the platform’s users typically fit into two categories: universities that receive too few applications and are looking to grow, and those with such a high volume of applications that it creates an administrative headache. The AI Highlighter tool was designed to help both.
The AI Highlighter enables institutions to filter and rank applications at scale, whittling thousands of applications down to a manageable pool of the most suitable candidates. It integrates AI reasoning and analysis into DreamApply’s enrolment software. The platform helps universities reduce application processing time by 40 per cent on average. “That is the grunt work that we should be giving to AI to deal with,” says Elevant.
“We have been building admissions solutions and conventional admissions pipelines for over 10 years. And they have been working reliably, processing millions of applications,” he says. “We are not going to go head-first into the magical AI land. It is not an AI admissions solution. It is a tool that augments some aspects of the conventional application pipeline in the safest way we can think of.”
For universities looking to grow their enrolment numbers, DreamApply’s Highlighter tool supports staff in engaging more deeply with applications to help them highlight any problematic areas that need attention and identify where the admissions team might be able to make a positive intervention, effectively “nurturing” applicants towards success.
The Highlighter is designed for AI to pick from drop-down options, giving it no room to generate unwanted and long responses, which ensures that users get structured outputs and usable data that is relevant to the institution’s admissions criteria.
Error and bias are common concerns with current AI tools. The Highlighter tool presents users with a reasoning trail to show how it filtered applications, making it easier for staff to verify the outputs. This is critical to building trust and ensuring safety and transparency around AI tools in admissions.
In any AI-assisted task, it is important to have a human in the loop with sovereignty over decision-making. “AI cannot be the last decision on the line, so a human has to take the last step,” says Elevant. “That ensures AI remains a tool in the hands of a human rather than the other way around. This is where the reasoning trail becomes crucial.”
The panel:
- Lauri Elevant, chief technical officer and co-founder, DreamApply
- Sreethu Sajeev, branded content deputy editor, Times Higher Education (chair)
Find out more about DreamApply’s new AI Highlighter. Hear more from Lauri Elevant here.
