The announcements kept coming.
The University of Miami eliminated its supplemental essays for the 2026–27 admissions cycle. Georgia did the same. Tulane acknowledged that artificial intelligence played a role. Cornell and Washington University reduced theirs as well. Each school offered a slightly different explanation, but the themes were familiar: Colleges drop the supplemental essays to simplify the application process, reduce student stress, remove unnecessary barriers. Those explanations aren’t wrong. They’re just describing the symptom rather than the disease.
One of the biggest misconceptions about college admissions is that admissions officers spend their days evaluating students. They don’t. They evaluate evidence. A transcript stands in for academic consistency. Recommendations stand in for character. Activities suggest initiative. Essays have always been an imperfect proxy for something much harder to observe: judgment, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to make meaning from experience.
None of those signals has ever been especially clean. Parents and English teacher shave edited essays for decades. Independent college admissions counselors have shaped narratives. Some students have had opportunities that others never will. Admissions officers have always understood that. Holistic review has never been about finding perfect evidence. It’s about deciding whether imperfect evidence points in the same direction.
Artificial intelligence didn’t break that system. It exposed how much of it depended on trust, and that’s a much bigger story than supplemental essays.
Across the economy, institutions are running into the same problem. Employers are questioning whether résumés still communicate ability. Software companies are rethinking coding interviews now that AI can generate functional code almost instantly. Universities are asking whether traditional assignments still reveal what students actually know. The challenge isn’t that AI produces convincing work. It’s that institutions are becoming less confident in their own ability to interpret the evidence sitting in front of them. College admissions is simply encountering that problem before most.
Seen through that lens, eliminating supplemental essays isn’t primarily about writing. It’s about institutional confidence. When decision-makers stop believing a measurement means what it once did, they rarely announce a crisis of trust. More often, they redesign the process and describe it as modernization.
The irony is that writing itself may be becoming more valuable, not less. Competent prose is now abundant; distinctive judgment isn’t. Anyone can now produce a polished paragraph, but recognizing which polished paragraph says absolutely nothing is becoming the rarer skill.
After enough admissions cycles, you begin to notice that admissions rarely invents new problems. Instead, it encounters them first. The disappearance of the supplemental essay doesn’t strike me as the end of one application requirement. It feels more like an early signal. College admissions is often dismissed as a niche corner of higher education. In reality, it has long served as an early warning system for broader changes in how institutions evaluate people.
The essays were never the real story. The real story is what happens when institutions stop trusting the evidence they’ve relied on for decades and have to decide what counts instea
Marc is the author of Untangling the Ivy League, a best-selling guidebook on the Ancient Eight. He earned a BA from Cornell University and an MBA from University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. Marc chaired the admissions ambassadors at Cornell and the admissions advisory board at UNC.
