Why Use an Education Consultant When We Have ChatGPT? For the Heartbeat.

“Which schools in Philadelphia would you recommend for my daughter?” I recently asked ChatGPT.  I had created a profile of an imaginary family relocating from London to Philadelphia with a hypothetical 13-year-old girl who would be entering 9th grade in the fall.  As her parent, I was concerned about how to bring her back to the UK in three years, when she’ll be entering 12th grade, or Year 13 in the English system, and about keeping her on track for a UK university. 

As we all explore and get excited by the capabilities of AI, we in the service industry must also continue to assess the value of our service as the likes of ChatGPT collate much of the information we have traditionally provided.  We’d be foolish not to think about how our services must continue to evolve in order to still have value in a world where data is so quickly found and compiled. Hence my little experiment with ChatGPT as I wondered how it would counsel an international family engaged in a US school search.  I chose Philadelphia as the destination because I know its schools and districts and would be well positioned to assess the information and counsel that ChatGPT might provide.

At first glance, Chat-the-Education-Consultant was impressive:  friendly, eager for some data about my theoretical daughter, and spot on with confirming that I should be concerned about repatriation to England.  Pretty quickly, it established that she would miss her GCSE exams in the English system and recommended that I find a British curriculum school for her in Philadelphia.  I agreed, but as our conversation “deepened,” I found myself getting more and more confused and turning back to Google and AI to confirm some of what Chat was telling me.  Over the course of our conversation, here were just a few of the mistakes it made:

·      It equated Year 11 in the UK with Grade 11 in the US.  Grade 11 is actually UK Year 12.

·      It recommended a British curriculum school in Philadelphia that doesn’t exist.

·      It recommended a private K-8 school, but my theoretical daughter would be entering grade 9.

·      It recommended the IB program at a particular private school as an alternative to the GCSE and A-level route; a good idea, except that the school in question doesn’t offer the IB program.

We know that ChatGPT is as good as the prompts we give it, and it’s likely, therefore, that I didn’t feed it enough specific parameters to make its search more accurate. As time goes on, it may improve its ability to infer or extrapolate, in addition to improving its fact-gathering capabilities, and we users will also get better at understanding the directives it needs in order to make its findings more reliable.

So, let’s assume that the factual mistakes my Chat consultant made were in part my fault because I didn’t direct it clearly enough before I sent it on its mission.  How close did it get, or might it eventually have gotten, to counseling me on good-fit schools for my child?

As I sifted through the pieces of information it provided about good US school districts and UK university requirements, I had the feeling I’ve often had as I read AI-generated writing:  that each of the pieces of information was correct, but that no one piece was connected to another.

It gave me UK university requirements; it told me the names of some good Philadelphia schools and strong suburban public districts. It told me that AP is a US academic program that might be a good option for my daughter.  It even told me that I might lose “home” tuition status at a UK university by being outside the country for three years.  In short, it laid out all of the ingredients of a complicated recipe, each one a valuable component, but it didn’t tell me how to combine them to make the end product a success; or perhaps a better analogy, it gave me most of the pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, but it didn’t tell me how to put them together or if I had in my possession all of the pieces.

For the sake of argument, let’s imagine that I already knew enough about the jigsaw puzzle—the different aspects of British vs. US curricula, the different exams, all of the criteria for my daughter’s return to the UK—and included it in the parameters I fed my Chat consultant at the beginning of my project.  Would I then have been more satisfied  with the information it provided?

Maybe it would have been a good starting point, but I don’t think it could have been my end point. If I imagine myself as a parent considering moving my child to another country, what I’m looking for is something more amorphous but even more critical than what even the best-informed and well directed AI consultant could give me: I’m looking for understanding of my parental anxiety, advise born of wisdom and experience, and maybe even a little human empathy. 

Because what are the real questions underlying the factual ones that I’m asking my Chat consultant?  Yes, I need to know if my daughter can enter the US education system and eventually return to the English one, but I need for something or someone to not just give me a constellation of data points, but to connect them into a full narrative that will work for my daughter, the very specific person she is.   And then?  Well, I need answers to the real questions, the ones I may not know how to articulate, the ones I may not have even admitted to myself: Is my daughter going to be ok if we make this move? Will she thrive in school and also be able to go home again?  Am I being an OK parent if I accept this job?

Yes, I’m looking to be informed but also reassured, and I for this I think I will always need a human.

For a Bennett blog on a similar topic: Can AI Replace a College Counselor?

Warmly,

Elizabeth Sawyer, CEO

Over the years, Bennett International Education Consultancy has worked with hundreds of corporations across the globe, many of them Fortune 500 companies, providing domestic and international school advisement & placement services - preschool through university - to the dependents of relocating employees. In addition to education placement, our team provides customized consulting for corporations with a range of education issues: education policy writing & benchmarking, tuition studies, group move advisement & planning, and remote education solutions.