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Consider a parent at her kitchen table on a Sunday night in late July. Her son starts college in three weeks, and she's trying to figure out whether his housing deposit went through and what he still needs to finish before he can register for classes. The housing office closed Friday afternoon. She can send an email and wait until Monday, click through a website she's already searched twice, or type the question into a chatbot on her phone, which will respond instantly and confidently... whether or not the answer is correct.
Versions of that moment happen in homes across the country, from the first campus search through senior year. Family involvement in higher education has been building for years, and so have families' expectations of how colleges communicate with them. The newer development is speed. Consumer AI has taught families that any question can be answered in seconds, and that raises a practical question for colleges with real enrollment consequences: when a family needs information, who provides it?
Families have had long-standing seat at the table
The data on family involvement has pointed in the same direction for a while. In the 2025 Prospective Family Survey from RNL and CampusESP, which drew on responses from nearly 9,500 families or college-searching students, 72% said they expect to hear from colleges at least weekly. Ninety-six percent said the quality of that communication with parents and families influences their college choice process, putting it nearly even with campus visits.
That involvement continues well past the deposit. CampusESP's 2026 College Family Survey of more than 43,000 families of current students found that nearly half of students interact with their families daily, and that students lean on families most for support with student life, academic advice and mental health. Seventy-seven percent of those families want to hear from their student's college weekly or more, extending a rise in expectations the survey has tracked year over year.
First-generation families tend to be among the most engaged, and they also have the least familiarity with how higher education works. At the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where more than 40% of students identify as first-generation, that gap is front of mind for Chris Brundidge, director of the Office of Student Enrollment Communications.
"I get nervous thinking about first-gen families trying to scour the website to get answers to their questions," he said.
Information gaps meet instant answers
Families have long struggled to find what they need. Thirty to 40% of prospective families say they can't locate information on cost, financial aid, academics and career outcomes, even though nearly all of them consider those topics important. The widest gap is post-graduation outcomes: 94% of parents said information on graduates finding jobs was important, and 68% said they didn't know where to find it. Once students enroll, the friction continues. One in three current families say it's difficult to find information on their student's college website, and 74% report difficulty navigating financial aid information, with many reaching out to the institution multiple times for clarification.
Generative AI hasn't created that gap, but it has changed how families try to close it. In an EAB survey of more than 2,500 parents of high school students, 57% said they had used tools such as ChatGPT to evaluate colleges and compare options for their children. In a separate CampusESP survey of college families, 85% said an AI assistant would be valuable, and it ranked as their top preferred way to get a quick answer, ahead of email, phone, and institutional websites.
"They don't care whether the answer really comes from AI or not," said Dave Becker, CampusESP's co-founder and CEO. "They just want the answer when they need it."
General-purpose AI tools are very good at sounding certain, but a consumer chatbot has no reliable way of knowing a specific institution's current deadlines, this year's housing policy, or whether a question is coming from the parent of an admitted student or a sophomore. "You ask a general question, you're going to get a more generalized answer," said James Bright, CampusESP's co-founder and CTO.
The alternatives families already use aren't much better. Parent Facebook groups rank at the bottom of families' communication preferences in the 2026 College Family Survey, and most families say they don't trust them as an accurate source of information.
The cost of a wrong answer
For colleges, the stakes show up in two of the metrics leadership watches most closely: yield and retention. Both can be influenced by families, and both are vulnerable when families are working from bad information.
On the enrollment side, CampusESP's analysis of more than 127,000 prospective parents found that students whose parents rank in the top quartile of engagement are three times more likely to enroll. The period between acceptance and the first day of classes is also full of tasks with hard deadlines, including deposits, housing applications, orientation registration, financial aid verification and immunization records. When a parent is the one helping a student through that list, a misunderstood policy or a missed step can stall enrollment entirely.
The same dynamic continues after the first year. CampusESP's 2026 retention study followed 20,566 first-time, first-year students at nine institutions from fall 2024 to fall 2025. Students whose parents had access to their progress information were retained at rates 6.9 percentage points higher than students without a connected parent, and the gap widened to 7.2 points for first-generation students. Unresolved account holds, billing notices, and missed registration windows can be signals of disengagement or simply be barriers to enrolling for another semester, and families who can see those issues are often the first to step in.
One trusted source for families, available 24/7
Some institutions are responding by consolidating family communication into a single hub and layering AI on top of content they already control.
CampusESP, a family engagement platform used by more than 450 colleges and universities, took that approach with its ESP Sense Family AI Assistant, launched this spring. The assistant draws on the content institutions already publish in their CampusESP family portals, including events, posts, emails, and approved institutional webpages, and tailors responses based on whether the person asking is a prospective parent, a current parent, or a student. Schools can add their own instructions to reinforce specific policies.
About 41% of family conversations with the assistant happen on nights and weekends, when campus offices are closed. The most common topics include upcoming events, housing, class registration, and financial aid.
"Families are asking questions in the evenings and on weekends, times when I am typically unavailable, and are receiving real-time responses," said Steven Ponce, director of parent and family communication and engagement at Santa Clara University.
CampusESP has since extended the assistant to text messaging to remove even barriers to urgent questions. Families can text a question and get a real-time response drawn from the same approved sources. The administrator can always pause AI replies for sensitive conversations, take over any exchange the assistant is handling, or add campaign-specific instructions.
Impact aside, trust needs to also be a part of the conversation when it comes to any tool in higher education. CampusESP says institutional data is never used to train AI models, protected student information isn't sent to models, and schools can opt out of AI features entirely.
The added benefits of an AI interface for parents
Institutions using these tools say the conversations have become one of the most useful outcomes, because they show what families are actually wondering about, including the things they never put in an email.
"Families are asking more questions, and different questions, than we typically receive in our inbox," said Emese Frank, senior coordinator for parent and family engagement at Boise State University. "It provides a clearer window into the family experience."
At UWM, the assistant surfaced broken links, outdated pages and confusing web content that had gone unnoticed. It also revealed demand the university hadn't fully measured: parents repeatedly asked about grades and registration, information governed by FERPA. That tracks with the 2026 College Family Survey, which found that nearly half of families who access their student's records do so using the student's own login. Brundidge brought the pattern to leadership, and the university is exploring ways to respond.
"With the AI Assistant, you get a front-row seat to what parents aren't telling you," he said.
Family expectations have been rising for years, and AI has compressed the timeline on which families expect a response.
The colleges best positioned to meet that expectation will treat accurate, accessible information as part of the family experience and decide deliberately where AI fits.
