Colleges continue to use technology to connect students to information, but a research gap exists regarding how colleges use a ubiquitous technology in the business world: chatbots. Moreover, no work has addressed whether chatbots address Spanish-speaking students seeking higher education in the form of automated (AI) chatbot responses in Spanish or Spanish-programmed chatbots. This study randomly sampled 331 United States institutions of higher education to learn if these institutions embed chatbots on their undergraduate admissions websites and if these chatbots have been programmed to speak Spanish. Results suggest 21% of institutions (n=71) embed chatbots into their admissions websites and only 28% of those chatbots (n= 20) were programmed to provide Spanish-language admissions information. Implications for college access and equity for English learners and L1 Spanish speakers are addressed.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.