AI-Written College Essays Are Becoming More Prevalent

Where Using AI On A College Essay Makes Sense

What To Avoid When Using AI For Your College Essay

Do Colleges Check Essays For AI?

How To Use AI Without Losing Your Unique Voice

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

As a college admissions expert and CEO of Top Tier Admissions, I’ve spent my career helping students and parents crack the code for admission to the most selective schools in the country, working with college applicants for more than a decade. Increasingly, the questions my colleagues and I hear are about AI: Is it okay to use ChatGPT to brainstorm a college essay? What about revising a draft? When does AI assistance become AI authorship? Can admissions officers tell when an essay was written by AI? And could using it hurt a student’s chances of admission?

AI-Written College Essays Are Becoming More Prevalent

AI has already made its way into the college essay. A 2024 foundry10 study of more than 500 U.S. teens who had applied to college found that 30% had used generative AI to assist with their admissions essays. Among those students, roughly half used it to brainstorm topics or check grammar and spelling, while nearly one-third used it to generate a first draft.

AI can be an asset in the college application process, but there are clear limits, and crossing them can put an applicant’s admission at risk. The first rule I give every student is simple: the college’s policy overrides everything else. Some institutions, including Brown University, have particularly restrictive policies. Brown prohibits applicants from using AI to generate application content, though they do allow basic spelling and grammar review. Where AI use is permitted, the question becomes more nuanced: how can students use these tools to strengthen the application process without allowing AI to replace their own thinking, writing or voice?

The essay is often the hardest part of the application to get right, which is exactly why AI can be so tempting. I’ve watched plenty of students stare anxiously at a blank Google Doc, unsure where to begin and convinced that the perfect idea or opening line has to materialize before they can start. That is when students need structure: thoughtful brainstorming, a clear outline and a teacher, counselor or admissions advisor who can help them find a path forward.

That kind of support should help a student uncover what they want to say, not supply the answer for them. After all, the choices a student makes about what to write and how to tell the story are precisely what make the essay valuable to an admissions reader.

Karen Richardson, dean of admission at Princeton University, writes that Princeton looks for “evidence of curious minds, intellectual spark, a willingness to step outside of one’s comfort zone and a true desire to learn about and from others.” The goal, she explains, is to understand the combination of experiences and qualities an applicant might bring to the university.

That makes the essay one of the riskiest places to outsource your thinking.

Students May Be Tempted To Use AI But Authenticity Matters More

The problem isn’t simply that using AI may violate a college’s rules. AI also leads to weaker essays. Cornell researchers recently compared 30,000 human-written college essays with essays produced by eight large language models and found that the AI-generated versions tended to be highly uniform, formulaic and distinguishable from actual student writing. Even feeding the models demographic information about the hypothetical applicant did not reliably make the writing sound more human.

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