‘I get my university application advice from TikTok’

Opening the subreddit r/ApplyingToCollege — colloquially known as A2C — feels a lot like stepping into an echo chamber of anxiety, confusion and obsession.

The premier subreddit for college admissions, A2C draws nearly 500,000 weekly visitors and 30,000 weekly contributions, peaking sharply during admissions season. And it's just one corner of a vast, mostly unregulated online universe (and multibillion-dollar industry) that is actively reshaping how students think about their futures – and how much they think they need us.

For school-based counsellors, this is a challenge worth taking seriously.

A window into application anxiety

Reddit posts with titles such as “Chance Me”, “Waitlist Warrior”, and “Am I Cooked?” are a window into just how deep college anxiety runs. When I was applying to college a decade ago, I vividly remember the hours I spent on College Confidential, a forum populated by anxious parents, endless acronyms and evolving Gen Z slang: OOS (out-of-state); WASP (Williams, Amherst, Swarthmore and Pomona); portal astrology (reading changes in applicant portals like tea leaves to predict a decision before it arrives).

Behind this jargon lives a stats-based culture where students reduce themselves to GPA and SAT scores, losing sight of what makes them compelling. This energy has only intensified with the resurgence of test-required universities and the explosion of new platforms for students to obsess over their numbers and parents to obsess over their children’s future.

"How to get my DD into HYPSM?" Translation: “How can I help my dear daughter (or DS for dear son) get into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT (aka the big five)?”

But this isn’t just students and parents shouting into the void. Thousands of higher education hopefuls follow educational influencers on TikTok and Instagram who offer application reviews despite lacking any formal qualifications. Students beg these strangers to assess their stats and predict their chances. The devastation when rejections roll out is palpable: they declare the American dream is dead, and that everything they did was for nothing.

Students are also increasingly turning to tools like ChatGPT to draft essays, research schools and even simulate admissions decisions – treating algorithmic output as authoritative guidance. The problem isn’t just that AI gets things wrong, though it does: it confidently produces outdated statistics, misrepresents financial aid policies and has no way of knowing whether a school is truly a good fit for a particular student. The deeper issue is that it creates yet another layer of noise between students and the counsellors who actually know them and the ever-changing admissions landscape. When a student arrives at an appointment having already “consulted” AI about their chances, their counsellor’s job becomes harder – not because the AI is right but because its confidence can be difficult to counter.

Cutting through the online noise

This cacophony of online noise presents opportunities and challenges for counsellors: how do we maintain our central role while navigating an industry that promises shortcuts at every swipe?

At its best, social media can be a powerful tool in counsellors’ hands. Sharing acceptances, scholarships and college commitments on your school or department account not only celebrates students’ hard work publicly but exposes younger students to opportunities they might not have heard of.

A counsellor-run Instagram story walking through what a college list actually looks like or a short video explaining demonstrated interest can compete with influencer content while offering something influencers can’t: institutional credibility and genuine knowledge of your student body. Learn how to use these platforms to generate something no algorithm can manufacture: genuine community and support.

Speaking students’ language

Counsellors should also familiarise themselves with the online landscape of US college admissions. Knowing what your students are consuming and which tools they are relying on helps you counsel more effectively and communicate more clearly. Speaking their language builds trust – and trust is what makes the rest of the work possible. The stats-obsessed algorithms are built to reduce students to numbers. But our job is to help students identify what sets them apart from their peers, and how to articulate it. Successful college applications are built on authentic storytelling, not metrics.

That said, online resources can be genuinely valuable – think crowdsourced spreadsheets of schools offering generous scholarships to high-need international students. But the same spaces can easily become breeding grounds for comparison and envy. Encourage students to step away from the noise whenever possible, because the speculation and obsession can send them down dark spirals. Getting ahead of this is part of the job, too.

In a world where application advice is only a swipe away, it can be tempting to feel sidelined – outpaced by influencers, algorithms and AI tools that promise certainty where we can only offer guidance.

But no anonymous Redditor can sit with a student who just got a rejection email. ChatGPT can't know a student’s full context: that a gap year might actually be the best thing for them, or that a lesser-known liberal arts college could change their life. That's our territory.

College counsellors wear many hats – researcher, teacher, therapist – and occupy a unique position in a student’s life that no platform can replicate. The noise isn’t going away, but neither is the need for a trusted educator in a student’s corner. Learn the landscape, use the tools – but also lean into the irreplaceable nature of the student-counsellor relationship.