It would be impossible for the 25 counselors and advisers in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions to contact the nearly 400,000 prospective high school students across the country who may consider Marquette as their college destination.
So, this year Marquette is trying out the help of a new recruiter … sort of.
“Her” name is Kiera, an artificial intelligence assistant created to connect with the students who admissions counselors may not have the time or resources to work with directly.
The college enrollment industry uses a funnel metaphor to classify students at various stages of the decision process: At the top of the funnel are prospects, or students who don’t know much, if anything, about the university, but have opted to receive general information from colleges. Next is the inquiries level, or students who have expressed direct interest in the university. Then, there are those who have submitted an application; moving down to admitted students and, lastly, those who have made a decision. Kiera’s use is mainly for those at the very top of the funnel.
“The prospects are students who we’ve generally never been able to actively contact in a personalized way,” says Lindsay Barbeau, director of enrollment strategy and recruitment systems. “We’ve only been able to send an email or tell them we’re coming to their high school, but because these students know little or nothing about Marquette, we typically would have to do a bit more to move them to the inquiry stage.”
By bringing Kiera online, there’s now a system in place to provide that missing individualized connection.
At the end of the day, she’s not replacing admissions counselors because the end goal is still to have these students interacting with the human beings in our office
Thomas Hermsen, admissions counselor
Take, for example, a recent prospect at the top of the funnel who received 10 emails from Kiera over a multi-month period. The student opened eight of those emails, providing insights that the student is interested in STEM and student life. Kiera then emphasized opportunities such as Marquette’s STEM majors, engineering clubs and organizations like Global Brigades.
“The appealing thing for me was, if we didn’t have Kiera, this group of students wouldn’t really be getting the type of individualized communication that other students who have indicated interest in Marquette are getting,” Barbeau says. “These students are going to be able to get these touch points and information that is really individualized to them and what they’re interested in that they would have never gotten before.”
Kiera didn’t form her know-how on her own. Barbeau and admissions counselor Thomas Hermsen, through college recruitment service CollegeVine, spent months building the AI’s database and interface. That included loading hundreds of webpages and documents with information about Marquette into the system, plus AI “interviews” with real Marquette staff to learn about topics such as alumni success, job outcomes and campus culture. They also trained how she interacts, such as focusing on finding a balance between a friendly and formal tone.
“In order to get Kiera up and running, we had to do quality checks,” Barbeau says. “If a student was asking about supply chain management, we had to go spot check that the email she was writing was accurate. It took us a while to finesse her and say, ‘Don’t talk about this’ or ‘Say it this way instead.’”
CollegeVine, too, has a set of checks and balances that rate each message from Kiera before it sends. If it doesn’t meet certain quality parameters, the message won’t be sent.
“Kiera knows a lot about a lot of different things,” Barbeau says. “One of the things she’s getting a lot better with is if a student doesn’t have an exact name match to an exact major we have. If they ask about kinesiology, what Marquette offers is actually exercise physiology. Not everything is apples to apples in higher education. We’ve had to do a bunch of lingo testing.”
Kiera has also been trained to refer certain topics, such as financial aid and scholarship information, to a staff member who is better equipped to help.
“We have her provide messaging about, say, how to sign up for a campus visit or how to meet with a counselor,” Hermsen says. “At the end of the day, she’s not replacing admissions counselors because the end goal is still to have these students interacting with the human beings in our office.”
As the team continues to fine-tune the new tool, Barbeau remains steadfast that the staff is committed to ensuring Kiera accurately represents Marquette’s messages, mission and values. The emphasis will always be on face-to-face interaction for Marquette’s admissions counselors. This fall alone, counselors attended nearly 900 events nationwide, including 536 high school visits, 145 college fairs and 216 one-on-one appointments.
“There are schools that will use the AI recruiter for a lot. They’ll use it for their current applicant pool and will do deadlines and material reminders,” Barbeau says. “We’ve been very intentional that we’re not using it for those things because we want to keep that personalized human element of it, because our team — and the university — does such a good job of that.”
