What AI Got Wrong—and Right—About Fashion Colleges Near Pittsburgh
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I had the privilege of sitting down with a high school admissions counselor who was dipping her toes into the world of AI for the first time. Her goal? Simple enough: help a student interested in fashion find colleges within a six-hour drive of Pittsburgh, PA. The counselor typed in what seemed like a perfectly reasonable query:
“Colleges with fashion programs within a 6 hour drive of Pittsburgh, PA.”
What came back? A hodgepodge of loosely-related institutions, some of which were laughably irrelevant. A museum made the list. So did a handful of schools that had nothing even remotely resembling a fashion program. It was a textbook example of how bad input leads to bad output—and how AI, while powerful, is only as precise as we train it to be.
Let’s break down why the search failed and how we got it back on track.
What Went Wrong
At first glance, the prompt seemed clear. But here’s what AI interpreted instead:
- “Fashion programs” was read loosely, pulling in any institution with a passing mention of fashion—sometimes in the form of costume design courses, art exhibits, or even museum collections.
- “Within a 6 hour drive” is too abstract for most AI models. They don’t do well with flexible geographic ranges unless you define them in terms of miles or cities.
- No filter was applied for accreditation, degree type (associate vs. bachelor’s), or program focus (design vs. merchandising vs. marketing).
- It also didn’t specify whether we were talking about colleges or any institution offering education.
The result? A misleading, incomplete, and frustrating list.
The Fix: Precision Prompting
We rephrased the search to be more specific:
“List of accredited colleges and universities offering bachelor’s degrees in fashion design or fashion merchandising within 300 miles of Pittsburgh, PA.”
That one tweak—removing ambiguity and dialing in the qualifiers—changed everything.
The Right Results: Schools That Actually Deliver
Here’s what the revised prompt gave us—finally, a list of actual degree-granting programs that make sense for students interested in fashion:
🎓 Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) – Indiana, PA
Program: B.S. in Fashion Studies
Focus: Fashion design, merchandising, and styling
A solid in-state option with specializations that speak directly to student interests.
🎓 Mercyhurst University – Erie, PA
Program: B.S. in Fashion Merchandising
Focus: The business of fashion—buying, planning, branding, and styling.
🎓 Kent State University – Kent, OH
Programs: B.S. in Fashion Design and B.S. in Fashion Merchandising
Highlight: One of the top-ranked fashion schools in the U.S., offering study-abroad in NYC, Florence, Paris, and Hong Kong.
🎓 Albright College – Reading, PA
Programs: Fashion Design, Merchandising, and Costume Design
A liberal arts approach with room to tailor a unique academic path in fashion.
🎓 Immaculata University – Immaculata, PA
Program: B.S. in Fashion Merchandising
A multidisciplinary program that blends creativity with commerce.
🎓 Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) – Pittsburgh, PA
Program: B.Des. (Bachelor of Design)
While not a traditional fashion school, CMU’s design program offers a forward-thinking lens for students interested in product design and branding.
The Real Lesson: Embrace the Learning Curve
This wasn’t just about finding fashion schools—it was about learning how to communicate with AI. And guess what? The bad results at the beginning? They weren’t failures. They were opportunities.
Each flawed result was a breadcrumb pointing us toward a better question, a clearer ask, a more refined process. That’s the beauty of working with AI—it teaches us just as much as we teach it.
If you’re an educator trying AI for the first time, don’t be discouraged by a search that goes off the rails. Lean into it. Break it. Learn from it. The missteps are where the magic starts.
