Chinese Graduates Choose University With the Help of AI

Chinese high school graduates are using free AI chatbots from major tech companies to choose colleges and majors after the 2026 gaokao, disrupting a costly counseling market, Rest of World reported.

The tools offer job-focused recommendations but require students to verify suggestions because outdated data or omitted options could damage their chances in China’s admissions matching process. Around 10 million students take the gaokao each year, then have only a few weeks to choose among thousands of schools and hundreds of majors.

Guo Xinyan, an 18-year-old graduate from Shandong province, used Alibaba’s Qwen after entering her exam score, provincial ranking, preferred majors such as law, accounting or finance, a moderate tuition budget and a preference for coastal cities. “My family and I have no experience with college applications, so we had to rely on social media and AI,” Guo told Rest of World, adding that her parents also asked ByteDance’s Doubao for suggestions.

Since 2025, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent and Baidu have launched AI tools specializing in college program recommendations, according to the report. The bots analyze historical admission cutoff scores and ask for details including gaokao scores, career interests, Myers-Briggs personality assessments, tuition preferences and local climate before sorting options into “reach,” “safety” and “backup” categories.

Alibaba’s Qwen said it had produced 23 million college program recommendation reports by July 8 and had recruited 300 college search specialists to improve the system’s reasoning, while Tencent’s Yuanbao said on July 10 that it had answered 200 million admission-related inquiries. Baidu said in late June that 15 million people had used its AI college advisory feature and promised human review of AI-generated recommendations.

Ye Xiaoyang, a Seattle-based economist and visiting professor at East China Normal University, told Rest of World that AI was useful for sorting tens of thousands of programs but could not decide students’ life direction. “Everyone can open a chat box, but it doesn’t mean everyone has the same ability to make choices,” Ye said.