OpenAI Announces College Planner and Study Tools for ChatGPT for Teens

OpenAI said in an October 7, 2026 announcement that College Planner is coming to ChatGPT for Teens, its default experience for users under 18, alongside new flashcard and quiz tools, early usage data for the teen tier, and support for two outside organizations.

OpenAI introduced ChatGPT for Teens on August 18, 2026 as the default experience automatically applied to accounts identified as under 18. The tier includes Study Mode, responsible homework reminders, quizzes, Learning Visualizations, and scheduled Study Hours, with age-appropriate protections on by default.

College Planner

OpenAI said hundreds of thousands of US teens already use ChatGPT each week to plan applications, track deadlines, research schools, and understand financial aid. College Planner brings together application requirements, deadlines, tasks, and financial-aid steps for the schools on a student’s list in one plan. Students applying to several colleges can return to update their progress, use a timeline to plan ahead, and ask ChatGPT questions along the way, from what a requirement means to how to get started. The tool also addresses paying for college, with help understanding financial aid requirements, tracking each school’s aid deadlines, and exploring scholarships and fee waivers.

The initial US experience is designed for high-school students in grades 10–12 who plan to attend a four-year college. OpenAI said it plans to bring College Planner to more countries and to expand support to two-year colleges, technical colleges, and trade schools over time.

OpenAI said its goal is to make help more accessible regardless of financial circumstances, alongside guidance from counselors, advisers, and families. The company said the tool is meant to manage the practical steps of applying without taking over the personal work of deciding where to apply, and that it aims to save students and families time and make a stressful process feel more manageable.

Early Usage Data for ChatGPT for Teens

OpenAI reported that as the teen tier became available to more teens globally, those with access sent about 2.7 million more learning-related messages on average than teens who did not yet have it. The most selected conversation starter prompts are “ask questions to develop my ideas,” “give feedback on my draft,” and “help me check my evidence.” In one week, nearly 1.2 million teens used Learning Visualizations for math and science concepts, and more than 180,000 used Study Mode for step-by-step learning support.

The company reported that teens spend under 15 minutes a day on ChatGPT on average, and that less than 2% of teens spend more than three consecutive hours on the service. In almost half of teen conversations that included a break reminder, teens took a break or ended the conversation within five minutes. Among teens with sessions longer than three consecutive hours, over 80% had at least one prompt related to learning. OpenAI said these patterns remain well below a publicly reported average of five hours for teen social media usage, and it stated that ChatGPT has 1.2 billion users across many countries, communities, and backgrounds.

Support for College Advising Corps

Alongside College Planner, OpenAI is supporting College Advising Corps, a nonprofit that partners with local programs to place recent college graduates as near-peer advisers in under-resourced high schools. OpenAI said its contribution will help the organization expand into new states and create an AI fellowship program through which advisers across participating states test and share practical ways to use AI to help students navigate the path to college.

College Advising Corps CEO Ekaterina Struett said in the announcement that the organization sees promise in College Planner as a tool that can help students prepare for conversations with advisers, stay on track, and continue moving toward a college that is affordable and aligned with their goals.

College Advising Corps reports more than 1 million students enrolled in college and more than $35.7 billion in aid and scholarships offered to students, with more than 300 advisers in 2026. The organization cites an average student-to-counselor ratio of 376 students to one counselor.

Digital Wellness Lab Student Advisory Council

OpenAI is also supporting Boston Children’s Hospital’s Digital Wellness Lab and its independent Student Advisory Council over the next three years to learn directly from young people about how AI fits into their lives. For the 2026–27 school year, the Lab will bring together about 22 students across two tracks: roughly 12 students ages 14–18 working on digital wellbeing projects in their communities, and roughly 10 students ages 16–20 focused on building AI chatbots and emerging technology. OpenAI said students in the AI track will test tools and recommend changes based on how they use AI, and that it expects to seek the council’s feedback on teen safety defaults, parental controls and notifications, and AI literacy. The company said its aim is to bring those recommendations into product and model decisions early and to report back to students on what changes and why.

The Lab’s council page names the 2026–27 tracks Changemakers, for students ages 14–18 with a commitment of three to four hours per month, and Architects, for ages 16–20 with a commitment of eight to ten hours per month. Both tracks run from early October 2026 through the end of May 2027, with an in-person summit for Architects planned for spring 2027. The council, now in its fifth year, selects a small group of teens each year from across the US to work with researchers and clinicians at Boston Children’s Hospital. The Lab states that the council is run by the Digital Wellness Lab, an independent research lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, and is not affiliated with a tech company. In an April 2026 statement, Lab founder Dr. Michael Rich and executive director Cori Stott said young people bring critical insights and knowledge that adults do not have.

New Study Tools

OpenAI said students reported that photographing and uploading notes to ChatGPT could take hours. A continuous multi-photo capture feature lets students photograph multiple pages of notes and automatically combine them into a single PDF ready to upload; it is available on iOS, with an Android version in progress.

New flashcards let a student upload class notes or choose a topic and turn the material into cards to review, mark the cards they know, return to the ones they missed, and shuffle the deck for another round. Decks are saved in a teen’s Library, and students can ask ChatGPT to pull up the flashcards and create a scheduled task to practice them. Students can also upload notes to turn them into interactive quizzes, and OpenAI said ChatGPT is better at recognizing when a user wants a quiz and creating one directly in chat. The company said it will keep learning from teens, families, and educators, checking how protections work in practice and sharing what it learns as ChatGPT for Teens evolves.