2026 hasn’t exactly been a banner year for edtech.
Longstanding dissatisfaction that’s simmered for years inside schools broke through to mainstream media. Outlets like The Economist proclaimed, “Edtech is profitable. It’s also mostly useless;” The Wall Street Journal wrote about “How YouTube Took Over the American Classroom;” and The New Yorker editor Jessica Winter petitioned readers, “What will it take to get A.I. out of schools?”
Underneath this mounting criticism are two related but distinct concerns. The first is about efficacy: do edtech tools actually accomplish what they say they do? The second is about isolation: whether or not they do what they say, what is the cost to student connection?
The latter is an area where even edtech tools with promising outcomes can rarely redeem themselves. Technology in schools is notoriously geared towards productivity and content delivery, not connection.
While it’s easy to blame the edtech industry for its social shortcomings, they’re arguably a reflection of the underlying market dynamics driving purchasing decisions: overleveraged, understaffed schools have turned to tech in search of efficiencies, not relationships. (For proof of that, look no further than COVID-19’s hellacious Zoom-school experiment, revealing that most schools’ tech stacks weren’t equipped to support social connectedness at scale.)
Today, edtech’s not-so-social past threatens to become an antisocial future. With natural language, anthropomorphic AI tools on the rise, companies promise a mix of time-saving teacher tools and tools that can teach, using humanoid AI tutors, coaches, and mentors.
The underlying message
Edtech either augments or supplants relationships, but it doesn’t build them. But that doesn’t have to be the case. We’re in a critical window where smarter demand and innovative designs could mean edtech powers–rather than disrupts–connection. We’re calling this prosocial AI, which we define as tech built in service of human connection, not in place of it
In a new report, my colleague Anna Arsenault and I outline those prosocial possibilities. The report draws on a 9-month pilot project we ran with 10 edtech platforms in the college and career guidance space. These platforms all aim to give students the information and support they need to navigate postsecondary life, from applying for college to exploring careers to landing their first job.
While most tools in the navigation tech market support postsecondary planning, far fewer connect users with people who can support their plans. We set out to flip that script, helping platforms build and test prosocial features and functionalities that put tech in service of human connection, not in place of it. Each platform piloted designs to make it easier for students to find, reach, and rely on others throughout their academic and professional journeys.
Here are a few examples of what that looked like in action:
Building students’ confidence to connect
“Prosocial AI is about designing for real-life interactions,” explained Nate Gerhard, the co-founder of Roadtrip Nation, who’s leading the development of the organization’s new virtual roadtrip career exploration and planning tool.
As part of this project, the Roadtrip Nation team piloted a career conversations tool that taught students about the importance of networking and provided an AI simulation for students to practice setting up and conducting a career conversation with a professional.
The core metric they were chasing? Building students’ confidence in building a network around their career interests. In pre- and post-surveys, students reported increased confidence in both booking and conducting interviews. As one student put it, “I learned that it’s not easy talking to someone from a certain field you’re interested in. But once you get used to it, you can be braver in your interviews.”
Revealing students’ networks to them
Another tool, REACH Pathways, piloted a social capital “quest” in which users learned the ins and outs of social capital through videos featuring other young people, mapped their own networks, and planned ways to reach out to their networks.
“Authenticity was top-of-mind for students, unprompted,” said Sasha Pena, head of employability at the company. “Students worried about feeling transactional. That shapes everything about how we design outreach scaffolding.”
Part of eliciting that authenticity came through helping students map the networks they’re already part of and supporting them to have new types of conversations with people they already know and trust. Students in the pilot remarked on the power of that reflection: “I just completed my relationship map, and it honestly surprised me how strong and diverse my connections are, even from years ago!” one user said. “Something that surprised me was remembering connections in higher positions at their companies, with whom I only interacted once or twice,” another said.
Seeing their networks more clearly helped drive connection: nearly half of users in the pilot reported reaching out to a contact during or right after the quest.
Brokering connections otherwise out of reach
Creating more scaffolding and support for outreach was one approach to prosocial design. But other platforms recognized that for many students, social connection is about access, not just skills.
Overgrad, a K-20 student success platform, wanted to bring more connections within reach for students, while also satisfying its customers’–mostly K-12 school districts and charter management organizations–desire to better track longitudinal outcomes post-high school graduation. The team piloted an alumni directory feature designed to help schools keep track of their alumni and current students connect with recent alumni attending colleges or working in the industries they’re interested in.
In a small focus group on what the directory should do, what stood out to the Overgrad team wasn’t just that students gravitated toward the social opportunity but how it contrasted with existing solutions on the market. As one student put it bluntly: “LinkedIn sucks. Nobody actually wants to meet anybody there.”
Better possibilities for edtech…and students
Leveraging the unprecedented power of AI, edtech leaders have a chance to build things that don’t suck. Part of that means responding to the current attacks on the industry with stronger evidence of academic efficacy.
But it also means building something new and different that departs from edtech’s less-than-social track record, and imagining tools that foster the social skills and connections that young people want and need to thrive.
These pilots were small in scope but have big implications for a different path forward in edtech.
Rather than defending the status quo, more edtech companies should look to the prosocial possibilities on the horizon and to these 10 platforms showing what happens when we build—and demand—tech that makes students more connected, not less.