Anxious Chinese students are trusting AI to help pick colleges and majors as they handle a high-stakes, time-sensitive process following the grueling national college entrance exam.
Guo Xinyan, an 18-year-old from Shandong province, had just three weeks after the gaokao to determine her future. With no experience in college applications, she turned to Alibaba’s chatbot Qwen. She entered her score, desired majors like law or accounting, and budget constraints. The bot generated a report with dozens of choices, a task that would be impossible for a human to manually manage given the sheer volume of options available.
Guo isn’t alone. Every year, around 10 million students face this exact dilemma. Teachers grade gaokao exam papers at Nanjing Normal University last month. Yang Suping/VCG via Getty Images. While college students in the U.S. often switch majors, Chinese universities have stringent requirements for transferring fields of study. This means students have only one chance after the exam to lock in their profession.
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Before the rise of these digital assistants, families relied on expensive private coaches or guidance books. Tech companies are now offering this service for free to get more people using their chatbots. Since 2025, Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu have all launched AI tools designed specifically for researching and recommending college programs.
These bots function as agentic AI systems that analyze historical admission data. They ask for gaokao scores, personality assessments, and preferences like tuition fees. The systems categorize schools into “reach,” “safety,” and “backup” lists. By July 8, Alibaba’s Qwen had produced 23 million recommendation reports. Tencent’s Yuanbao bot answered 200 million inquiries related to admission by July 10.
Humanizing the machine
Guo’s younger sister faced the same post-exam uncertainty, but she didn’t have to wait for a corporate tool. Xindy Lin, a user experience designer in Fujian province, built her own chatbot on OpenAI’s Codex. She combined a “Zhang Xuefeng skill” with admission data and a university catalog. The agent recommended supply-chain management and e-commerce marketing. Lin told Rest of World that individuals cannot digest so much information in such a short time.
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Despite the popularity of these tools, they are not infallible. Ye Xiaoyang, a Seattle-based economist and visiting professor at East China Normal University, argues that AI can easily cite outdated data or steer similar students toward the same programs. If a student relies too heavily on the bot and misses a match, they lose an entire round of applications. This makes the technology a double-edged sword for families with limited resources.
Guo decided to verify the chatbot’s output against official guidance books and social media posts on RedNote. She specifically checked dormitory conditions. She told Rest of World that real people’s experiences felt more trustworthy than the generated lists. Ye Xiaoyang added that while AI is excellent at sorting data, it cannot help students figure out what to do with their lives. He launched his own platform to teach students the rules of admission so they can think for themselves rather than blindly following a bot.