The Ethical Case for Easing the Load

Ask any VP of Enrollment what’s keeping them up at night, and you’ll hear the same two concerns: the pressure to convert more students, and the risk of burning out the people doing that work.

Admissions counselors are now expected to manage more applicants, respond faster, maintain deeper personalization—and somehow do it with shrinking teams and rising expectations. It’s not just unsustainable. It’s unfair. And if we’re going to talk about ethical AI in admissions, we need to talk about staff experience too.

Because ethics isn't just about how AI treats students. It's also about how it supports the people guiding them.

At enroll ml, we’ve spent the last year documenting how admissions counselors actually spend their time. Our admissions work-time study found that the average counselor now spends 657 hours per year just wrangling the CRM: building queries, reviewing exports, updating records, and manually prioritizing outreach. That’s more than a third of their available work time—and it happens before they talk to a single student.

That’s not strategy. That’s triage.

We’ve seen institutions like Illinois College save over 500 counselor hours per year by automating that prioritization. At Roosevelt University, leadership used enroll ml to identify disengaged depositors—students at real risk of melting—and free counselors from trying to monitor every single record equally. The result? Melt was reduced, and morale improved.

This is the ethical use of AI in action.

By surfacing real-time behavioral signals and converting them into daily outreach priorities, we help counselors do the work they signed up for—connecting with students. Instead of being stuck behind pivot tables, they’re spending their best energy where it makes a difference.

That’s not just a productivity win. It’s a retention strategy.

If we want to keep great people in this profession, we have to give them systems that respect their time, elevate their strengths, and reduce the burden of manual prioritization.

On July 29, we’ll explore this very idea during our live Video Podcast, "Planning for Ethical AI in Admissions," with Elizabeth Kirby. We’ll talk about what ethical implementation really looks like—and how the right data systems don’t replace your team, they protect them.

Save your seat now: Planning for Ethical AI in Admissions