OpenAI adds College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens
OpenAI is adding a College Planner tool to ChatGPT for Teens and has released its first usage figures for the under-18 experience, saying teens spend under 15 minutes a day on average.
OpenAI says it will "soon" add College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens, the default experience for accounts it identifies as belonging to users under 18. The company also released early usage data and announced new partnerships focused on teens.
College Planner puts application requirements, deadlines, tasks and financial-aid steps for each school on a student's list into a single plan. Students can also ask ChatGPT questions as they work through it. The first version is for US students in grades 10–12 applying to four-year colleges. OpenAI says it plans to add other countries and two-year, technical and trade schools later. It did not give a launch date. According to OpenAI, hundreds of thousands of US teens already use ChatGPT each week to plan for college.
The company's usage figures:
- Nearly 1.2 million teens used Learning Visualizations for math and science in one week, and more than 180,000 used Study Mode.
- Teens spend under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT on average.
- Fewer than 2% of teens have sessions longer than three consecutive hours.
- In almost half of conversations that showed a break reminder, the teen took a break or ended the conversation within five minutes.
OpenAI did not say how it measured these numbers.
OpenAI is also funding College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that places advisers in under-resourced high schools. The money will help the group expand into new states and start an AI fellowship for its advisers. Separately, OpenAI is supporting a teen lab at Boston Children's Hospital for the 2026–27 school year. About 22 students will work on digital-wellbeing and AI projects there and give feedback on safety defaults, parental controls and AI literacy. OpenAI did not disclose how much it is giving either organization.