Large Language Models for Assisting American College Applications
This addresses the challenge for high-school students navigating complex college admissions, though it is incremental as it applies existing LLM methods to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of fragmented and ambiguous American college applications by introducing EZCollegeApp, an LLM-powered system that structures forms and grounds answers in authoritative documents, with evaluation through automated testing and human quality assessment.
American college applications require students to navigate fragmented admissions policies, repetitive and conditional forms, and ambiguous questions that often demand cross-referencing multiple sources. We present EZCollegeApp, a large language model (LLM)-powered system that assists high-school students by structuring application forms, grounding suggested answers in authoritative admissions documents, and maintaining full human control over final responses. The system introduces a mapping-first paradigm that separates form understanding from answer generation, enabling consistent reasoning across heterogeneous application portals. EZCollegeApp integrates document ingestion from official admissions websites, retrieval-augmented question answering, and a human-in-the-loop chatbot interface that presents suggestions alongside application fields without automated submission. We describe the system architecture, data pipeline, internal representations, security and privacy measures, and evaluation through automated testing and human quality assessment. Our source code is released on GitHub (https://github.com/ezcollegeapp-public/ezcollegeapp-public) to facilitate the broader impact of this work.