Using ChatBot to Provide Personalized College Counseling to High School Students

Rehaan Aaditya, Morteza Sarmadi

Abstract: Recently, we noticed that high school students find it hard to obtain reasonable and accessible college counseling services to help guide them through major decisions such as selecting the universities that fit them, what majors to take, whether or not to take double degrees or double majors, financial aid options etc. Conventional college counseling services are very expensive and also very limited in availability, making it for high school students to receive personalized advice. This research paper talks about the potential of AI-ChatBots, which would successfully be able to provide affordable, and scalable solutions for college counseling which is a market rapidly growing in demand. By leveraging Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML), chatbots would be able to offer real-time, unique advice for college applications, scholarships, and course selection, while reducing the financial and accessibility barriers for students. The paper delves into use of both supervised and unsupervised learning models, and most types of datasets needed, and the probable challenges that could come up during execution. We also explore how AI can offer better well suited guidance to every applicant than the online resources, offering a solution that is both reasonable on the basis of price and easily accessible for the students who are not able to purchase traditional college counseling services. Our research demonstrates that AI-driven can be an effective tool to democratize access to quality college quality college guidance.

Keywords: Natural Language Processing (NLP), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK), GPT (Generative pre-Trained Transformer), Support Vector Machines (SVM), Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM)