With affirmative action outlawed, and use of SATs in decline, selective colleges are paying ever more attention to essays. ChatGPT poses a challenge.
By Emma Whitford, Forbes Staff
Seventeen-year-old senior Ethan Rivera is finding the college application season at his Livingston, New Jersey high school stressful—and competitive. “It’s very hostile,” he says, “everybody’s on top of each other about their own process.” One question students pester each other with: What did you write about in your essay?
It’s with good reason that students are particularly focused on the personal essay this year, because some of the most desirable colleges are, too. When the Supreme Court ended affirmative action in June, Chief Justice John Roberts left open one window through which colleges can still consider race in their admissions decisions—if a student chooses to write about “how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration, or otherwise.”
In response to the ruling, highly selective colleges are putting more stock in the application essay this fall, reports David Hawkins, chief education and policy officer at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Most of what we’re hearing comes from that highly selective group that they are going to lean more heavily on the essays, whether it’s redesigning the [essay] prompts or giving them added emphasis in the review process,” Hawkins says.
It’s worth noting that there are plenty of schools that don’t give essays much weight and some that don’t even require them. According to recent NACAC data, 19% of schools assign “considerable” importance to essays, 37% consider them of “moderate” importance, 27% consider them of “limited” importance and 17% don’t consider essays at all. By comparison, in the same survey, 74% consider high school grades of considerable importance and another 19% assign moderate weight to those grades.
Yet significantly more schools now consider essays important than give high weight to SAT or ACT scores, which since the start of the Covid pandemic have become optional at a majority of schools. NACAC reports just 5% of schools give scores considerable weight, with another 24% giving them moderate importance.
Among the top schools, the emphasis on essays is particularly pronounced. Eighty-four of the top 100 schools on Forbes’ America’s Top Colleges 2023 list deem student essays to be “very important” or “important” to the admissions process, according to information they provided to what’s known as the Common Data Set. Note that those answers were submitted before the Supreme Court nixed affirmative action, which appears to be making essay reliance even greater. Another 10 schools out of the Forbes top 100 report they rely on essays to a lesser extent, while two (Colby College and Hillsdale College) don’t make that data available on their website.
Only four of the top 100 said they don’t look at essays at all. All four are part of the 23-campus California State University system, which doesn’t ask applicants to submit essays because doing so can create barriers for first-generation students, according to a CSU spokesperson. By contrast, the University of California schools on our list do consider essays, with #5-ranked UC Berkeley and #7-ranked UCLA both rating them as very important pieces of the admissions process. In 1996, California voters made the use of affirmative action in admissions in state schools illegal, and the state’s college systems seem to have reached different conclusions—at least when it comes to essays—about the best way to remain inclusive.
More than a thousand U.S. colleges use the Common Application, which allows students to fill out one application and submit it to several participating schools at once. As part of the Common App, students are asked to write an up to 650-word personal essay responding to one of seven prompts. The first, and perhaps most important post-affirmative action: “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.” (Other prompts ask students to describe what they learned from a challenge or set back or to reflect on a time when they questioned a belief or idea. The last of the seven prompts allows students to write about anything they wish.)
But that single essay—which can essentially be on anything—is not enough for some highly selective colleges. While seven of Forbes’ top 10 colleges use the Common Application, six of those same schools also require students to submit additional short essays tailored to the institution. For example, #2-ranked Yale University, a common app user, also asks applicants to submit short answers to eight questions, including “What is it about Yale that has led you to apply?” and “What inspires you?” Columbia University, ranked #6, wants to know what texts, resources and outlets contributed to the applicant’s intellectual development outside of the classroom. And #1-ranked Princeton University asks applicants to describe in 50 words or less what song represents the soundtrack of their life at this moment.
In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling, some schools have subtly tweaked their questions. “We changed the application questions slightly this year to invite students to talk a little bit more about themselves in a more personal way,” says Adam Sapp, assistant vice president and director of admissions at Pomona College. “We didn’t change the lengths or the number” of questions, he adds. Pomona, ranked #36, uses the Common App but adds its own supplemental application.
Meanwhile, students like Rivera, who is Latino, are left wrestling with whether to write about their race—something the admissions officers might not otherwise know—or another, equally important aspect of themselves. “It’s really interesting trying to balance having to put that into all of my writing—supplemental essays and personal essay—to make sure they recognize that part of me while also trying to talk about the other defining traits about me,” Rivera says.
Rivera’s college short list includes Boston University, Emerson College in Boston, Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, and American University in Washington, D.C. All use the Common App, with its personal essay, while requiring supplemental essays as well. He just finished that Common App essay and says he rooted it in his experience as a Latino. “I might not have chosen that to be the thing that I based my essay on” if affirmative action was still in place, Rivera says. But now, “I did want to include it so that I can show that it is an important aspect of people’s identity and that it should be recognized.”
Hawkins advises students to include whatever they want in their essay if it will help the admissions officers get to know them. “We encourage them to put anything and everything they think will be helpful in their essay, including their race or ethnicity,” he says. “Let’s say a student comes from X race or ethnicity, and they were brought up in a community that had next to no money for schools, and the student had to overcome significant hardship because they grew up in that community. That’s the kind of holistic consideration that, as a college, they might be looking for—perseverance and ingenuity.”
Susie Rinehart, a Boulder, Colorado-based college essay coach who worked with Rivera, advises her students not to include their race in their personal essay if it’s not related to their chosen topic. “I think it would be a mistake to gratuitously throw in your race in an essay,” Rinehart says. “If [an admissions officer] is evaluating the essay, they might have a momentary concern that they are influenced by that race card being thrown in there, and then, would that disqualify their complete evaluation as being unbiased?”
In addition to the race question, students, their advisors and admissions offices are all now wrestling with a second new issue: how ChatGPT might affect those ever more important essays. (You can see our early attempts at getting ChatGPT to write college essays here.)
Schools have started to offer varying advice. The University of Washington admissions website, for example, instructs applicants not to use AI at all to assist or write their essays. But the Georgia Institute of Technology takes a more permissive approach; it tells prospective students not to copy and paste essays from ChatGPT or other AI platforms into their application, but doesn’t bar its use. Instead, according to the university’s admissions website, students should “approach and consider any interaction with an AI tool as a learning experience that may help you generate ideas, provide alternative phrasing options, and organize your thoughts.”
Hawkins expects some students will turn to tools like ChatGPT for help this fall. “We know from our research with students that the application is a fairly stressful process for them, and so do I think that there will be students who use ChatGPT or other AI? I’m sure some students will be tempted to do that.” Whether using AI will hurt an applicant could depend on what the college is hoping to get out of the essay, Hawkins says. If the school is reading it to evaluate writing ability, using AI could hurt. But if admissions officers are using the essay simply to learn something about the student, employing AI as a writing tool might not be a problem, he says.
High school senior Nataleigh Pienkowski, of Blacksburg, Virginia, another of Rinehart’s college-bound clients, wrote her college essay on a question she faced daily in her part-time job at a pizza parlor: how much cheese should she put on the pizza? The example let her dive into her thoughts on keeping an abundance mindset over a scarcity mindset. She didn’t use ChatGPT to help at all, but suspects some peers may do so. “A lot of the people around me have not started their college essays, and I know that for a lot of people at my school, [they say] as a joke ‘Well, I’ll just have ChatGPT write mine.’”
In fact, despite all the current focus on AI, admissions officers have long had to wrestle with inauthentic student writing. For years, online companies have offered for-hire writing services that allow students to pay for completed essays. Plus, overbearing parents, particularly those who have been through the process with their older children and think they understand what admissions officers want, also sometimes help to write an essay for a child, says Rinehart. “Those end up being terrible essays,” she says. “They sound like braggy grownups instead of these curious, courageous, creative kids … and ChatGPT tends to also have a grownup, stale voice.”
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