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AI in Action: How AI Is Changing Enrollment Marketing for Private Schools
What happens when AI becomes the first admissions director a family talks to?
That was one of the questions I asked during my recent AI in Action webinar, and I believe it is a question every school leader should be thinking about right now.
Most of the conversations I have had with school leaders about artificial intelligence have focused on how we can use it in our work. How can AI help us create content, write emails, analyze data, develop strategies, or simply save time? Those are important questions, and there are tremendous opportunities for admissions and marketing teams to use AI more effectively.
But there is another side of this shift that may be even more significant.
Parents are using AI, too.
Prospective parents are beginning to use tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to research schools, compare their options, evaluate strengths and weaknesses, read and summarize reviews, and determine which schools might be the best fit for their children. That means AI isn’t simply changing how we do our work. It is beginning to change the parent journey itself.
Parents Aren’t Just Searching. They’re Asking.
Think about how much the school search process has changed over the years. Before the internet, word of mouth was one of the primary ways parents learned about schools. Then the internet changed everything. Parents could go online, search for private schools in their area, visit school websites, and gather information on their own.
Google changed the process even further. Schools invested in search engine optimization and Google Ads because we wanted to appear when a prospective parent searched for something like “private schools near me” or “Christian schools in Atlanta.” Those strategies are still important, but AI introduces something very different.
With a traditional Google search, parents are typically presented with a list of options that they have to investigate. With AI, they can have a conversation.
A parent can ask, “What are the best private high schools near me for a student who is academically strong, loves athletics, and wants a school where faith is an important part of the experience?” They can then ask AI to compare those schools, identify their strengths and weaknesses, summarize what parents say in online reviews, or suggest which schools might be the best fit.
In other words, parents aren’t just searching anymore. They’re asking.
During the webinar, I shared results from one of my recent New Family Enrollment Experience Surveys. At one school, more than 30% of the responding new parents said they had used AI during their school search process.
What interested me even more was how they were using it.
One parent used AI to compare schools. Another asked it to create an evaluation matrix. One parent used it as a starting point to gather information about different schools before conducting more in-depth research. Another asked for a list of pros and cons based on online reviews. Parents also reported using AI to compare test scores, colleges attended by graduates, class sizes, and other factors.
These aren’t hypothetical examples. These are actual responses from parents who recently went through the enrollment process.
That should get our attention.
What Does AI Say About Your School?
During the webinar, I conducted a live demonstration using a ChatGPT account that did not have the history and knowledge contained in my personal account. I wanted to approach the search as closely as possible to the way a prospective parent might.
I started with a fairly broad request. I told ChatGPT that I was a parent relocating to the northern Atlanta area and asked about private schools. I then narrowed the search by explaining that I was looking for a high school for my son, that he was active in sports, and that faith was important to our family.
The conversation quickly became more specific. Instead of simply giving me a directory of schools, ChatGPT helped narrow the possibilities based on the criteria I provided. I could continue asking follow-up questions about particular schools, their strengths and weaknesses, reviews, programs, and fit.
I would encourage you to conduct this same experiment with your school.
Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or another AI platform and approach it as a prospective parent. Don’t simply type the name of your school and ask what it knows. Give AI a realistic parent scenario and see whether your school emerges in the conversation.
Then dig deeper.
What does AI say are your school’s strengths? What does it identify as potential concerns? How does it describe your school compared with your competitors? What does it say about your academic program, faith integration, athletics, student experience, tuition, or financial aid? Does it accurately understand what makes your school different?
You may be surprised by what you find.
Your Website May No Longer Be Your First Impression
For years, I have told schools that their website is their front door. In many ways, it still is. But we now have to recognize that a prospective family’s first meaningful interaction with your school may happen somewhere else.
They may learn about you through an AI-generated answer before they ever click on your website.
AI systems can draw on information available across the web as they formulate responses. Your school’s website is an important part of that digital footprint, but so are the stories you publish, reviews about your school, directories and other third-party sources, and the broader collection of information that exists about your school online.
This leads to one of the most important points I shared during the webinar:
AI can’t tell stories that don’t exist.
If your website is filled with generic marketing claims but very little substantive content, AI has less useful information to work with. If you rarely publish stories about your families, students, teachers, alumni, outcomes, programs, and mission, those stories aren’t part of the digital body of evidence that helps others understand your school.
Schools have spent years thinking about creating content for prospective parents. Now we also need to think about whether that content clearly communicates who we are when AI is helping those parents make sense of their choices.
If AI Can’t Distinguish Your School, Neither Can Parents
This brings us to a challenge that existed long before ChatGPT: differentiation.
Visit enough private school websites and you will see many of the same messages. Academic excellence. Caring teachers. Strong community. Developing the whole child. Preparing students for the future. Faith-based education.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these messages. In fact, many of them may be absolutely true. The problem is that your competitors are often saying the same things.
If an AI platform is asked to compare your school with three other schools in your market, is there enough distinctive information available for it to explain why your school is different?
During the webinar, I summarized this challenge with a simple statement:
If AI can’t distinguish your school, neither can parents.
The rise of AI makes positioning and differentiation even more important. Schools need to move beyond broad claims and provide evidence. Tell the stories. Explain the outcomes. Answer the questions. Show what your mission looks like in practice. Help parents understand not simply what you offer, but why it matters and which families are most likely to thrive in your community.
Build Content That Helps Parents Make Decisions
One strategy I believe schools should consider is developing what I call a Parent Decision Content Hub.
Most school websites are designed primarily to tell parents about the school. A Parent Decision Content Hub takes a slightly different approach. It helps parents answer the bigger questions they are asking as they work through their decision.
For example, a Christian school might develop substantive content around questions such as:
- What makes a Christian school different from a public school?
- How do I know if private school is right for my child?
- Is Christian education worth the investment?
- What should I look for when touring a private school?
- How does financial aid work at a private school?
- How is faith integrated into the classroom and student experience?
- What questions should I ask when comparing private schools?
These are questions parents are already asking. Increasingly, they may be asking them directly to AI.
Schools should also develop comprehensive FAQ content that answers the specific questions prospective families have about admissions, tuition, academics, athletics, student life, transportation, financial aid, safety, and other important areas. The goal is to build a deeper library of useful information that clearly answers the questions parents are trying to resolve.
We need to think beyond marketing pages and create more decision-making content.
The Second Shift: How Are You Using AI?
The first half of this conversation is about how AI is changing parent behavior. The second half is about how AI can change the work we do in admissions and marketing.
I believe we need to move beyond simply opening ChatGPT occasionally and asking it to write a social media post.
During the webinar, I focused on five practical areas where AI can help enrollment and marketing teams: content creation, lead nurturing, parent communication, survey analysis, and strategic leadership.
For example, your school probably already has a tremendous amount of valuable content that isn’t being fully utilized. You may have a great family story on your website that was published once and then largely forgotten.
During my live demonstration, I took an existing family story from Westminster Catawba Christian School and used AI to begin transforming that single story into multiple pieces of content for different purposes and platforms. The same core story could support social media, email, admissions follow-up, and other marketing efforts.
That’s where I see one of the greatest opportunities with AI. We don’t necessarily need AI to replace the creative work we are already doing. We can use it to extend and multiply that work.
Expertise + AI = Scale.
The same principle applies in other areas. AI can help develop a series of lead-nurturing emails for prospective families, draft a personalized response to a parent inquiry, identify themes within hundreds of open-ended survey comments, or serve as a thought partner when an admissions director or head of school is wrestling with a strategic issue.
The goal isn’t simply to do more. It is to create more capacity to focus on the work that matters most.
Don’t Lose the Human Side of Enrollment
As excited as I am about the possibilities of AI, there is an important caution in all of this.
Families don’t enroll in our schools because we have the best AI tools.
They enroll because they develop trust. They experience a sense of belonging. They connect with teachers, administrators, students, and other parents. They believe in the mission of the school and develop confidence that this is the right place for their child.
AI doesn’t replace any of that.
We also need appropriate guardrails around how we use these tools. Schools should protect confidential information, verify AI-generated outputs, keep humans involved in the process, and make sure the use of AI remains aligned with the school’s mission and values.
One of the principles I shared in the webinar is worth repeating:
AI should assist your judgment, not replace it.
The opportunity is to let AI help us with the work that can be accelerated, analyzed, organized, drafted, or multiplied so that we have greater capacity for the work that requires a human relationship.
Where Does Your School Go From Here?
We are still early in this shift, and I don’t think any of us fully knows where it will lead. The technology will continue to change, and the specific tools we are using today will look different a year from now.
But I don’t believe schools should wait to see what happens.
I would encourage your leadership, admissions, and marketing teams to begin with three questions:
How are families using AI to evaluate our school?
Where could AI create more capacity for our enrollment and marketing team?
How can we build reusable AI capabilities that are specific to our school?
You don’t need to transform everything at once. Choose one process. Experiment. Learn what works. Then build from there. That was the 30-day challenge I gave participants at the end of the webinar.
AI is going to continue changing the way families search for schools and the way enrollment and marketing leaders do their work. We need to understand both sides of that shift.
But through all of these changes, I believe one principle needs to remain at the center:
AI is not replacing the human side of enrollment and marketing. It is increasing the value of it.
Watch the AI in Action Webinar
If you missed the live webinar, I invite you to watch the full recording. I go deeper into how parents are using AI during the school search process, demonstrate a prospective parent search in ChatGPT, and share practical examples of how admissions and marketing teams can begin putting AI into action.
Watch the AI in Action webinar on YouTube →
Enrollment Marketing AI Summit
And, if you want to go even deeper in AI, plan to join us at our Enrollment Marketing AI Summit on November 11-12, at The First Academy in Orlando, FL.
