Summary

OpenAI says a College Planner for ChatGPT for Teens will help US students organise application requirements, deadlines and financial-aid steps. The company also announced expanded study tools and a teen advisory programme.

OpenAI says it will soon add College Planner to ChatGPT for Teens, a tool intended to help students organise college applications and financial-aid tasks. In an announcement dated October 7, 2026, the company also described new study features and a programme for teenagers to advise on AI tools. College Planner’s initial experience is designed for US students in grades 10–12 applying to four-year colleges.

Contents

A plan for applications and financial aid

College Planner is designed to bring the requirements, deadlines, tasks and financial-aid steps for a student’s chosen schools into one plan. Students will be able to track progress, see upcoming tasks and ask ChatGPT questions about requirements or how to begin. OpenAI says the tool is intended to organise practical steps without making the personal decision of where to apply for students.

The planner will also help students understand financial-aid requirements, track aid deadlines and explore scholarships and fee waivers. OpenAI says it plans to extend the experience to more countries and, over time, to two-year colleges, technical colleges and trade schools.

The company is also supporting College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that places recent college graduates as advisers in under-resourced high schools. OpenAI says its contribution will support expansion into new states and an AI fellowship in which advisers will test and share practical uses of AI for helping students navigate college applications. The announcement presents the software as support for application tasks alongside advice from counselors, families and advisers.

More ways to study with notes

OpenAI says students will be able to turn notes into flashcards and interactive quizzes. Flashcards can be reviewed, shuffled and saved in a student’s Library; students can also ask ChatGPT to create a scheduled task for practising them. The company says it has made quizzes easier to create from uploaded notes and for ChatGPT to recognise when a student is asking for one.

A separate capture feature lets students photograph multiple pages of notes and combine them into a PDF for upload. OpenAI says this is available on iOS and that it is working to bring it to Android. The announcement does not give a release timetable for the other study changes.

Teen input and early usage figures

For the 2026–27 school year, Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab will bring together about 22 students across two tracks: roughly 12 students aged 14–18 working on community digital-wellbeing projects, and about 10 aged 16–20 focused on AI chatbots and emerging technology. The programme is planned over three years. Students in the AI track will test tools and recommend changes, with topics expected to include teen safety defaults, parental controls, notifications and AI literacy.

OpenAI also reported early usage figures for ChatGPT for Teens: nearly 1.2 million teens used Learning Visualizations in one week, and more than 180,000 used Study Mode. The company says teens spend under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT on average, while less than 2% spend more than three consecutive hours. These figures describe product use; they are not measures of changes in learning outcomes. OpenAI says it will continue gathering feedback from teens, families and educators as the experience develops.

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