Our software is designed to enhance decision-making for the most impactful choices in each student’s educational path.
Imagine being in a major foreign city and looking for a restaurant. There are 100,000 different restaurants. They offer various cuisines and span a wide range of prices, atmospheres, and operating hours. Some are excellent, while others are a complete waste of time and money. You need to choose one, but you don't have access to Google Maps, Yelp, or any other tool. You only have a list of restaurants based on how difficult it is to get a table.
Now, imagine this decision is one of the most important of your life. Wouldn't you want help from a powerful assistant?
What if instead of choosing a restaurant, you had to decide on a medical procedure or your education?
By now, most people have heard of artificial intelligence or "AI", and many have interacted with it. Many have experimented with ChatGPT or “the new Bing,” asking it to write poems about their siblings or to explain to them the basics of nuclear physics. They've been amazed by its power, as have we at Path.
Even with all the data in the world, no model is perfect. No machine can perfectly predict the future.
They may also have noticed that these machines are not perfect. While they are very powerful, sometimes they are simply wrong. Even with all the data in the world, no model is perfect. No machine can perfectly predict the future. That's why for life-altering decisions, AI, ML and analytics are best suited as personalized assistants.
As a side note - our software relies mainly on machine learning algorithms ("ML") , not artificial intelligence ("AI"). There are important differences that explain why ML is more appropriate than AI to solve this problem and inform how we decided build the Path app algorithms. There is also some ambiguity in the terminology for what constitutes AI and ML. We use terms interchangeably for the purposes of this blog post because they broadly serve similar purposes in assisting human-decision making, but we invite you to read about the difference here (from Microsoft), or here (from Google).
At Path, we believe AI isn’t here to replace our decision-making, it’s here to enhance it, to complement us, and to excel at tasks we struggle with. In the context of choosing a post-secondary institution, that means collecting and analyzing hundred of millions of different data points on outcomes, understanding student's interests and delivering only the best of recommendations so that we, as humans, can decide effectively.
At Path, we believe AI isn’t here to replace our decision-making, it’s here to enhance it, to complement us, and to excel at tasks we struggle with.
These decision-making assistants are emerging in other industries. In healthcare, doctors use machine learning tools to help them make diagnostics, employing imaging-based algorithms to evaluate the likelihood of cancer. New digital health companies are tackling social determinants of health using prediction algorithm software to detect risk factors and connecting people with resources in their community.
When making crucial decisions, humans need the most powerful tool.
We excel at many aspects of the college selection and admission process. We can visit schools and explore the campus and surroundings to determine if they could feel like home for a few years (or a lifetime). We can talk with students and recent graduates about school traditions to understand whether we fit in. We can write admissions essays and conduct interviews.
However, we struggle with using the vast amount of emerging outcomes data to know which schools and field of studies have good financial outcomes and align with our interests. Should we prioritize degrees for graduation rate or employment rate? What about income or repayment rate on loans?
Faced with countless options and limited help, we often rely on heuristics for one of life's most important decision. That’s why we still rely on college rankings (even though we know that they’re flawed), or our parents’ (sometimes limited) opinion.
Faced with countless options and limited help, we often rely on heuristics for one of life's most important decisions.
That’s where Path comes in.
Our college counseling assistant is built to focus each student’s search on college programs that will maximize their potential. That, to us, means embarking on an education and career path that aligns with their interests in high school while securing financial stability and independence. It's a complicated task, but one for which our machine learning algorithms are perfectly suited.
We want high school students everywhere to feel empowered when they’re considering post-secondary education options. That's why we're passionate about equipping them with the most powerful of technologies to make the most important of decisions.
Sebastien Boyer is the Founder and CEO of Path Technologies. Images are generated with the help of our robot friend DALLE-2.