A recruiter named Sarah will text you back at 2am
Sarah works for a hundred-odd colleges. She texts, she emails, she calls. She knows the difference between the honors biology track and the regular one, and she will explain it to a nervous seventeen-year-old at any hour without checking her watch. Sarah is not a person. She is one of the AI agents Zack Perkins ships from a CollegeVine office on Huntington Avenue in Boston, and in her first stretch of work she logged more than half a million conversations with prospective students.
That is the company Perkins runs today: a platform that hands universities a roster of AI agents - a Recruiter for the applicants, an Advisor for the enrolled, an Ambassador for the alumni - each one built to do the administrative labor that burns out admissions staff and quietly pushes the cost of college upward. More than a hundred schools, from small liberal-arts colleges to alternative providers, have signed on. Perkins frames it in deliberately unsentimental terms: he wants to rearchitect the operating system of higher education. Strip out the busywork, lower the cost, widen the door.
It is a long way from advising your friends' younger siblings in May. But the logic that started it is the same logic running underneath the AI.
Most public high school students don't get a lot of college guidance.
The admissions officer never showed up for him
Perkins grew up in New Jersey and went to a large public high school - the kind where the college process is a rumor you piece together yourself. He had friends at private schools where admissions officers from the best colleges in the country would simply show up, shake hands, learn names. There was no clean way for an ordinary public-school kid to get inside that circle. That asymmetry is the whole origin story, and he has never really stopped telling it.
He and two friends from New Jersey high schools got accepted early to their top colleges, then found themselves doing the obvious thing: advising the younger kids around them in May, after their own decisions were in. The three split across Harvard, Cornell, and UChicago. Two of them, Perkins and Vinay Bhaskara, landed at Harvard, where in 2013 they started a side project called Admissions Hero. The name was blunt. The mission was too: give every student the guidance that only a lucky few were born next to.
There is a small, telling detail in how Perkins chose his own school. He applied to Harvard early and nowhere else - in part, he has said, so he wouldn't take a spot from a friend - and committed on the 31st of October, after first eyeing the Huntsman Program at Penn. A kid this careful about the social math of admissions was always going to end up building inside it.
He dropped out to build a college company
Three semesters of economics and computer science, and then he left. In 2015, a sophomore, Perkins took the leave that became permanent and ran the company full time. His co-founders took leaves too. He is the first to name the joke in it. He has called his own arc "cliche and ironic" - the dropout building a college admissions platform - and the self-awareness is part of why people trust the pitch.
By 2017 the renamed CollegeVine had grown from eight employees to thirty inside a Cambridge office, selling cheaper online counseling and pushing a data-driven, sometimes contrarian point of view. Bhaskara liked to argue that an aspiring Silicon Valley programmer might be better served by San Jose State than Stanford - proximity and pipeline over prestige. They ran pilots giving free counseling to high-achieving, low-income students in Louisiana. The throughline held: democratize the thing, even when the data embarrasses the brand names.
Then came the money and the model shift. A $24 million Series B in 2019 took total funding to around $31 million, and the AI wave gave Perkins a way to do at machine scale what counselors had been doing one teenager at a time.
So we were accepted early to our top colleges, and we were advising our younger peers in May.
He thinks the four-year degree should come apart
Ask Perkins where higher education is heading and he will not defend the status quo. He talks about unbundling - swapping the monolithic four-year degree for a string of 6-to-12-month micro-credential programs you collect across a life, cheaper and, he argues, more effective. It is a heretical thing for a man whose company is named after college to say, which is exactly the kind of contradiction he seems comfortable holding.
He also likes pulling back curtains. His favorite under-discussed number: the average tuition discount rate sits close to 50 percent, yet most families pay attention to a sticker price almost nobody actually pays. Transparency, in his telling, is its own form of access. If the rich kids know the real price and the public-school kids don't, that gap is just the admissions-officer-at-the-door problem wearing a different suit.
His advice to founders is the same blade turned inward. "Make sure you're clear on why you're doing what you're doing," he says, then lists the honest reasons a person might build something - to solve a real problem, to make the world better, to make money, to learn. Clarity over romance. It is how he talks about the AI too. When his recruiter lagged on a hard, politically charged question in a demo, he didn't spin it. "That said, the lag wasn't great. We'll work on that."
Three agents, one student lifecycle
The product Perkins talks about now is not a chatbot bolted onto a website. It is a cast. In 2024 CollegeVine expanded from the Recruiter into a full set of agents mapped to the three constituencies a university actually has: prospective students get the Recruiter, enrolled students get an Advisor, and graduates get an Ambassador. Each one is tuned for its moment in the arc - the anxious applicant, the sophomore deciding whether to stay, the alum a development office hopes will pick up the phone. The bet underneath is that most of what universities pay humans to do at these touchpoints is repetitive, answerable, and scalable, and that the humans should be freed for the parts that aren't.
By the time the platform had a year of conversations behind it, the Recruiter alone was deployed at more than 95 partner institutions and had run past half a million exchanges with prospective students. The roster reads less like the Ivy League and more like the real map of American higher ed - small colleges, regional schools, and alternative providers like General Assembly that sell skills rather than diplomas. That is the customer Perkins keeps choosing: the institution serving the student who never had an admissions officer knock.
He is candid about the seams. The agents carry content moderation, which means there are subjects they will sidestep, and in at least one public demo the system stumbled on a politically charged question before recovering. Perkins didn't hide it. The honesty is strategic and also just how he operates - ship the thing, name the flaw, fix the flaw.
Access, priced and unhidden
Strip away the AI vocabulary and Perkins is arguing about a single thing: who gets to know how the system really works. The private-school kids had the admissions officer in the room. They also, eventually, learn the open secret that the listed price of a college is mostly theater - that with the average discount near half, the number on the brochure is a starting bid, not a bill. Perkins wants that knowledge handed out evenly, by a Recruiter that will text any kid back, by pricing he thinks should be transparent, by counseling that used to cost thousands and now scales toward free.
It is why the unbundling talk matters more than it first sounds. If a degree can come apart into 6-to-12-month pieces collected across a working life, the gatekeeping changes shape. The question stops being which eighteen-year-old got the visit and starts being who can pick up a credential when they need it. That is a long bet, and Perkins makes it the way he makes most of them: clearly, unsentimentally, and without pretending the old system was ever neutral.
Four lines that explain the man
The shape of the thing he built
Things that stick to him
CollegeVine started life as "Admissions Hero," a Harvard side project in 2013.
The average tuition discount rate - a number he insists families deserve to see.
The day he committed to Harvard, having applied early and nowhere else.
Friends from New Jersey, split across Harvard, Cornell, and UChicago.
The contrarian pick over Stanford for a would-be Silicon Valley coder.
The name CollegeVine's AI recruiter goes by in demos.