AI Transforms China’s College Application Process

The air in millions of Chinese living rooms is thick with a unique blend of exhaustion and electric anxiety. The ordeal is over, but the trial has just begun. For the past two weeks, the nation’s youth endured the Gaokao (高考), the notoriously grueling multi-day college entrance examination. Now, with scores released, a new, arguably more daunting, challenge looms: filling out the university application form. This isn’t a simple matter of listing a few dream schools. In China, this single document is a labyrinth of choices that can dictate the entire trajectory of a young person’s life—their career, their social standing, their future prosperity. A single misstep, a poorly chosen major, or an overambitious university selection can feel like a life sentence.

For an American audience, it’s difficult to overstate the cultural gravity of the Gaokao. It’s far more than an SAT or ACT. It is the modern incarnation of the ancient imperial civil service exam, the keju (科举), a system that for centuries promised a path to power and prestige based on intellectual merit rather than aristocratic birth. The Gaokao is the primary, and for many, the only, engine of social mobility in a fiercely competitive society.¹ It is a societal ritual, a “social mobilization” that brings the country to a standstill, with construction sites silenced and traffic diverted around testing centers.¹ This immense cultural weight is the source of the collective national anxiety that descends upon families in late June.

This pressure has been exponentially compounded by recent educational reforms. In an effort to move away from a rigid, one-size-fits-all system, most provinces have adopted the “New Gaokao” (新高考) model.³ The old binary choice between a liberal arts or science track has been replaced by a complex “3+1+2” system. Students must take three core subjects (Chinese, Math, English), then choose either Physics or History as an anchor subject, and finally select two more subjects from a remaining pool of four.⁴ This reform, intended to grant students greater freedom and encourage personalized development, has had a paradoxical effect. It has shattered the old, simple decision-making framework, creating a dizzying matrix of 12 possible subject combinations and thousands of university-specific major requirements.⁶

The explosion of choice has led to an explosion of uncertainty. A well-intentioned government policy designed to foster creativity has inadvertently catalyzed a billion-dollar “anxiety industry”.⁸ Into this vortex of fear and confusion, a new player has emerged, promising to cut through the noise with the cold, hard logic of data. The age of the AI-powered Gaokao advisor has arrived.

Part 1: The Billion-Yuan Anxiety Market and Its Human Cost

Before algorithms entered the fray, the anxiety market was the domain of human consultants, known as Gaokao zhiyuan guihua shi (高考志愿规划师), or Gaokao Application Planners. No figure looms larger in this world than Zhang Xuefeng, a media-savvy education guru who has achieved rock-star status among anxious parents. With over 8 million followers on social media, Zhang is famous for his brutally pragmatic, often controversial, advice that relentlessly prioritizes employment prospects over all else.⁹ He once famously advised that if his own child insisted on studying journalism, he would “definitely knock him out,” a comment that ignited a national debate about the value of humanities education in the modern economy.⁹

This brand of hard-nosed realism comes at a steep price. Zhang’s company, “Fengxue Weilai,” sells consulting packages with names like the “Dream Card” and the “Dream Fulfillment Card,” with prices that have steadily climbed to ¥12,999 and ¥18,999 respectively (approximately $1,800 to $2,600).⁹ Demand is so frenzied that slots for the 2026 application season are already sold out, fueling accusations of “hunger marketing” designed to inflate perceived value.¹³

Zhang’s success has spawned a chaotic and largely unregulated industry. Data shows the Gaokao application market is now worth over 1 billion yuan (about $140 million) annually, with more than 1,200 companies vying for a piece of the pie.¹⁴ The barrier to entry is alarmingly low. Investigations have revealed that one can become a certified “planner” through online courses that take as little as half a month, with some vendors promising a certificate in a day or two with a “guaranteed pass”.¹⁶ The situation became so rampant that China’s Ministry of Education had to issue a public warning, clarifying that it has never authorized or issued any official “Gaokao Volunteer Planner” vocational certificate, rendering most credentials on the market effectively meaningless.¹⁸

This is a market where price is dictated by parental anxiety, not by the quality of service. Critics deride the high-priced services as ge jiucai (割韭菜), a popular slang term that literally means “cutting leeks,” used to describe the exploitation of naive consumers. Many former clients complain that they paid thousands of dollars for little more than a repackaging of publicly available data and generic advice.⁹

For some, the outcome is not just financial loss, but a derailed future. Consider the story of Yang Nan, a student from the eastern province of Shandong. Believing that “you get what you pay for,” her family paid a premium of ¥5,499 (about $760) to a “top-tier” educational institution for guidance.¹¹ The service she received was a nightmare. It consisted of a single, one-hour meeting, during which the “planner” spent 20 minutes on a personal phone call. The planner simply input Yang’s scores into a software system, generated a list of over 200 potential choices, and when Yang had specific questions about eligibility for certain language programs, she was told to call the university admissions offices herself.¹¹

The result was catastrophic. All 96 of her undergraduate choices on her application failed. Her 61 subsequent choices for vocational colleges also fell through. She was ultimately admitted to a rehabilitation program at a vocational school in a southern province—despite having explicitly told the planner that she did not want to study medicine or move to the south.¹¹ Her story is a harrowing testament to a market failure where fear and information asymmetry have created a system ripe for exploitation, one that was practically begging for a technological disruption.

Part 2: Enter the Algorithm – The Tech Giants’ New Battlefield

The disruption came swiftly and decisively. Seeing a market defined by high prices, limited access, and questionable quality, China’s tech giants—Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent—have stormed the field, weaponizing their core competencies of data processing and massive scale.¹⁷ This isn’t about simple search anymore. These companies have rolled out sophisticated AI-powered tools, many built on their own proprietary large language models (LLMs), that function as intelligent agents capable of deep search and natural language conversation.¹⁶

Alibaba’s Quark browser has emerged as a dominant player. It claims to have already served over 120 million users, a scale unimaginable for human advisors.²⁰ Crucially, over half of its users come from China’s third-tier cities and below, demonstrating its power to democratize access to information in regions historically underserved by expensive consulting services.²²

Quark’s suite of free tools includes a “Gaokao Deep Search,” a “Smart Application Selection” feature, and its flagship product: the “Volunteer Report”.²² By simply inputting their score, province, and a few preferences, students can receive a comprehensive, personalized report that Quark claims is of “expert-level” quality. The adoption has been stunning. On the first day scores were released in Shanghai, an estimated 20,000 students—one in every three candidates—generated a free report from Quark.²⁴

The technology behind this is formidable. Quark’s system is powered by a specialized LLM, trained on Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen model, and fed by a vast, proprietary “Gaokao Knowledge Base.” This database contains years of admission data from over 2,900 universities, along with employment statistics and major-specific information, all of which is cross-verified for accuracy.²² To teach the AI to “think like a volunteer expert,” Quark’s team had hundreds of human planners annotate and score the model’s outputs, creating a feedback loop that continuously refines its reasoning.²²

It’s not just the tech behemoths. The AI revolution has also inspired a new generation of startups. Liu Rui, a Peking University graduate who previously worked on LLMs at Baidu and Tencent, founded “Gaokao Paper Kite” (高考纸鸢).²⁷ His motivation was intensely personal. As a high school student, his parents paid ¥1,000 for a rushed, 20-minute consultation with a retired teacher who pushed him toward a “safe” major he loathed. Liu secretly changed his application at the last minute and vowed one day to fix the broken system.²⁷ His startup aims to use AI-generated content to provide free, high-quality, personalized advice, explicitly to “break the information gap” and combat the predatory practices he experienced firsthand.²⁷

The business model of these AI tools—offering powerful services for free or for a nominal in-app purchase fee, like the ¥388 (about $50) “Volunteer Card” from the popular app Youzy ²⁸—is a direct assault on the high-priced human advisors. This isn’t just a new product entering the market; it’s a fundamental restructuring of the market’s value proposition. The battle is shifting from exclusive, high-cost personal assurance to accessible, low-cost data processing. The tech giants are transforming a market built on anxiety into a platform war, and the old guard of human advisors is caught directly in the crossfire.

Part 3: Man vs. Machine – A Turing Test for Life’s Biggest Decision

This collision of human intuition and artificial intelligence raises a profound question for millions of families: Who do you trust with your future? The debate pits the perceived wisdom of human experience against the brute-force analytical power of the algorithm. Each has distinct advantages and critical flaws.

AI’s greatest strength lies in its ability to conquer the “information asymmetry” that plagues the process.²⁹ An AI can sift through decades of admission data, enrollment plans, and employment statistics from thousands of universities in mere seconds—a feat of data-crunching impossible for any human advisor.²² Its recommendations are based on a comprehensive analysis of historical trends, providing a crucial “sanity check” that can prevent disastrous errors based on outdated information or hearsay. The quality of these outputs is increasingly impressive. A recent study by a research team at Tsinghua University compared 30 expert reports, which cost between ¥1,000 and ¥5,000, and found that the reports generated by some AI products were comparable in quality, especially in terms of data completeness and analytical rigor.³¹

However, for all its analytical power, AI suffers from a profound empathy gap and a complete lack of accountability.

The table below summarizes the core trade-offs between the two approaches.

Feature	Human Advisors (e.g., Zhang Xuefeng)	AI Assistants (e.g., Quark, Youzy)
Cost	Extremely high (¥5,000 – ¥20,000+) 9	Free or low-cost freemium model (<¥500) 24
Data Processing	Limited to individual experience and manual research 9	Processes massive, nationwide historical data in seconds 22
Personalization	Potential: High (with a skilled, empathetic advisor). Reality: Often low (template-based, as in Yang Nan’s case) 11	Algorithm-driven based on user inputs. Struggles with subjective nuance and unstated needs.29
Accountability	Theoretically high, but practically non-existent in an unregulated market. No recourse for bad advice.11	None. Explicitly a “reference tool.” The user bears all responsibility.16
Emotional Support	A key, often implicit, part of the service. Provides reassurance to anxious families.16	None. Purely a data-driven utility.
Accessibility	Highly exclusive. Limited slots create a “hunger marketing” effect.13	Massively scalable. Available to millions instantly, especially in underserved areas.22
Regulation	Largely unregulated “Wild West.” Prone to fraud and unqualified “experts”.16	Operated by major tech firms, but data privacy is a key concern.33 Data accuracy is a core asset.

AI tools come with explicit disclaimers: they are for reference only. If the advice leads to a catastrophic outcome like Yang Nan’s, there is no one to hold responsible. As one industry insider noted, some parents aren’t just paying for information; they’re paying for a human being who can “bear the risk of decision-making,” a psychological burden an unaccountable algorithm cannot shoulder.¹⁶

Furthermore, AI cannot truly understand the nuances of a student’s personality, their deepest passions, or their complex family dynamics.²⁹ It can process “interest” as a data point, but it cannot counsel a student torn between a parent-approved, pragmatic engineering degree and a heartfelt but risky desire to study fine arts. The story of Han Rui, a student from Guangdong, perfectly illustrates this gap. After getting her score, she used AI tools to generate a list of options but found she still had to turn to social media to ask current students about subjective factors like campus culture, teaching quality, and the real-world career paths of graduates—information the AI couldn’t provide.³⁰ Finally, these platforms collect a trove of sensitive personal data—scores, rankings, interests, and aspirations—creating significant privacy risks and making users potential targets for fraud if the data is ever breached.²⁷

The emerging consensus among experts and savvy users is that the future is hybrid. The optimal strategy is to use AI as an indispensable assistant, not a replacement oracle. Students can leverage the algorithm to do the heavy lifting—the data analysis, the initial filtering, the generation of a baseline plan of “冲稳保” (chong-wen-bao, or “rush, stable, secure”) choices. Then, they use human intelligence—conferring with parents, teachers, and trusted mentors—to refine that plan based on personal values, subjective interests, and life goals.³⁰ As one Quark executive put it, the goal of the AI is to “help you see the options clearly,” not to make the choice for you.²⁵

Part 4: The Invisible Hand of the State – Reclaiming Authority

The Chinese government has not been a passive observer of this market chaos. The Gaokao is not just an educational matter; it is a cornerstone of social fairness and stability, and the state is now moving decisively to reassert its authority over the process.¹ Its strategy is two-pronged, wielding both a stick and a carrot.

The stick comes in the form of regulation and enforcement. The Ministry of Education, in coordination with market regulators and public security bureaus, has launched zhuanxiang zhili (专项治理), or “special governance campaigns,” to clean up the industry.¹⁸ These campaigns are cracking down on the most egregious practices: exorbitant pricing, false advertising that promises “guaranteed admission,” and outright fraud.¹⁸ A key target has been the fraudulent “planner” certification industry. Market regulators in Beijing have already launched investigations and levied fines against institutions offering these worthless “quick-fix” training courses, sending a clear signal that the Wild West days are numbered.¹⁹

The carrot is the state’s own powerful, free, and authoritative alternative: the “Sunshine Gaokao” (阳光高考) platform and its integrated “Sunshine Volunteer” (阳光志愿) information service system.³⁸ This official platform, heavily promoted by the Ministry of Education, offers many of the same features as the commercial AI tools. It provides access to an extensive database of universities and majors, career and psychological assessments, and personalized recommendations based on the same “rush, stable, secure” principle.³⁸ Its ultimate advantage, however, is its status as the official source. Experts note that while commercial AI is powerful, its reliability depends on the accuracy and timeliness of its data, an area where the official government system inherently has the upper hand.²⁹

This dual approach is more than just a public service initiative; it’s a strategic maneuver to re-centralize control. The rise of a high-priced private market threatened to make access to quality guidance a function of wealth, undermining the exam’s meritocratic foundation. The subsequent rise of Big Tech’s AI tools, while democratizing information, shifted influence over this critical life decision to private commercial entities with opaque algorithms and profit-driven motives. By cracking down on the private market’s worst actors while simultaneously deploying a superior, state-controlled public alternative, the government is aiming to become the single source of truth. The goal is to ensure that this crucial pillar of Chinese society serves national objectives of fairness and stability, not the bottom line of a charismatic guru or a tech giant.

Conclusion: An Algorithm for the Future?

The frantic rush to enlist AI in one of life’s most consequential decisions is more than just a fascinating tech story. It is a microcosm of modern China itself—a society grappling with how to reconcile ancient traditions with hyper-competitive pressures and the seismic disruptions of technology.

The AI tools represent a central paradox. On one hand, they are a powerful democratizing force. An algorithm in the hands of a student in a remote village in Gansu can provide access to a level of data and analysis that was, just a few years ago, the exclusive privilege of wealthy families in Beijing and Shanghai who could afford elite consultants.²² This is a profound step toward leveling the informational playing field.

On the other hand, does a system optimized for data risk homogenizing a generation’s dreams? If millions of students follow the same AI-driven advice, flocking to the majors with the highest historical starting salaries and best employment rates, what happens to passion, creativity, and intellectual diversity? Does it inadvertently push an entire generation down the most pragmatically “optimal” path, stifling the risk-takers, the artists, and the philosophers who are essential to a vibrant society?⁹

In the end, despite the awesome power of the algorithm, the final choice remains deeply, stubbornly human. The process of filling out the Gaokao application, as many have noted, is the first real lesson in adulthood—a process of self-discovery, of weighing external pressures against internal desires.³⁰ The ultimate challenge for this generation of Chinese students will be to master these powerful new tools without letting the tools master them. The final decision will not be made by a server farm or a line of code. It will be made in the quiet of a teenager’s mind, armed with a mountain of data but ultimately forced to look inward, embodying the timeless human struggle to chart one’s own course in an ever more complex and algorithm-driven world.

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