Artificial intelligence can now enhance college application essays without sounding robotic. The tools can write compelling essays for students to pick from and refine. 

As a college admissions counselor, I have edited hundreds of essays. This is the first year my students asked whether they should use artificial intelligence to write them. I warned them not to. I told them it would flatten their voices, that there would be no metaphors, dialogue, sensory details — the things that make an essay feel alive. But few listened to my advice. 

During one session, a student had her mom run her supplemental essay for her application to Cornell University through ChatGPT. When I read it, I had to admit that it was better than the version I had worked on with the student. It had, I confess, a stronger metaphor and ending. Another student asked me if I could tell that their essay was AI-generated. I couldn’t. 

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With acceptance rates falling at many U.S. colleges thanks to an increase in applications, students feel pressure to apply to more schools, and AI programs help them do that faster. ChatGPT, for instance, is being used increasingly to help construct essays. Rather than fight against it, I reluctantly provided feedback on the AI-enhanced drafts, trying to ensure that my students were turning abstract ideas into concrete ones. Following the maxim “show, don’t tell,” some essays needed a paragraph rewritten. Others benefited from minor adjustments, like removing cliches. 

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When early application results came in, my students using AI-generated essays got into their top choices: Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, University of Virginia and other schools. One even earned a Coca-Cola Scholarship, a prestigious $20,000 award with a less than 1% acceptance rate. With each acceptance, I had to admit I’d been wrong about using AI. 

The question is no longer whether AI essays work. It’s why. 

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My students had already been using ChatGPT for months for their homework and personal advice. When application season began, the bot remembered these details. It knew their preferences and interests through the Memory feature and could tailor their essays accordingly. That wasn’t enough, though. Students first brainstormed essay topics and writing outlines without AI assistance. They then gave that information to ChatGPT along with past self-written essays. It began mirroring their voice. 

In a 2025 study, Cornell University researchers concluded that large-language model-generated college essays were generic compared to human-written ones, but they didn’t use elaborate prompting or engage with the models beforehand. That’s not the way people are using ChatGPT now. The college essay isn’t a novel or a blank canvas. It’s less ambiguous. It serves a purpose: to show who you are outside of grades and test scores. With a defined purpose, training and prompting, models can now write compelling essays for students to pick from and refine. 

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Throughout the application cycle, I worried that my students would get caught using these tools. When submitting applications on the Common App, students sign a statement certifying that all the work is their own. But a policy is only as strong as its enforcement, which so far seems nearly impossible. The Common App and most universities likely don’t use AI detection tools because they’re unreliable. Despite warnings that admissions officers are trained to spot AI indicators, recent studies show that most people mistake AI-generated text for human writing. In fact, one study fine-tuned ChatGPT on award-winning authors’ works and found that readers favored AI-generated text over human writing for stylistic fidelity and quality. This suggests that students may actually gain an advantage by using these tools on their college essays. 

Since colleges and the Common App can’t detect AI writing, they rely on third parties, like high school counselors, to report students with documentation. Even then, the investigation process is vague. When I asked 10 top colleges about it, most didn’t respond. Pomona College and the University of Virginia declined to comment. At the University of Michigan, the student may be asked to provide a written statement to refute the allegation. Stanford University didn’t disclose its investigation process and instead said, “We’re aware of the tool and its capabilities, and at the same time, applicants should, to the best of their ability, express their ideas in their own words and in their own style.” However, as the popularity of these tools rises, they may be forced to embrace their usage. 

Guest opinions in Open Forum and Insight are produced by writers with expertise, personal experience or original insights on a subject of interest to our readers. Their views do not necessarily reflect the opinion of The Chronicle editorial board, which is committed to providing a diversity of ideas to our readership.

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As I near the end of this year’s admissions cycle, I am no longer a skeptic. The college essay will become a measure of judgment — who can best guide the tool and refine its output.

My role will shift, too. Years of reading essays have taught me what makes an essay strong, and I can help students make those judgment calls. The best counselors won’t be the ones who resisted AI the longest. They’ll be the ones who learned it first. 

Sophie Sajnani is the founder of River Consulting, a college consulting firm. 

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