For years, the college essay has been sold with an appealing premise: somewhere inside an admissions office, a thoughtful person will sit down and read what you have written. Students spend months choosing a topic, revising sentences and worrying about whether an opening paragraph sounds sufficiently like them. The imagined reader is almost always human.
The actual college application review process has never been quite so romantic.
Admissions offices at selective universities receive tens of thousands of applications, sometimes more than 100,000. To process them, colleges rely on teams that can include full-time admissions officers, seasonal readers and other trained evaluators working from detailed rubrics. Anyone wondering how long admissions officers spend on essays might be surprised by the pace. At Virginia Tech, for example, human readers average about two minutes per essay.
Now another reader has entered the room.
Last year, UNC-Chapel Hill announced that it was using artificial intelligence to automatically score application essays for writing quality, while emphasizing that applications were still evaluated comprehensively by trained human readers. More recently, Virginia Tech introduced an AI essay reader that works alongside a human evaluator, stepping in as one of two scorers for its short-answer essays.
So, do colleges use AI to read essays? At some institutions, the answer is now yes. But the more interesting question is why.
For most of my career, the challenge in college admissions was scarcity on the student side. There were a limited number of strong applicants competing for a limited number of seats. Today, scarcity has migrated to the other side of the desk. Applications have multiplied while the number of hours available to evaluate them has not.
That changes what admissions officers look for in essays in ways that are easy to miss. A college essay may still be personal, idiosyncratic and beautifully written, but it also has to survive a system designed to process enormous quantities of information consistently. Rubrics, numerical ratings and now AI in college admissions are not departures from that system. They are its logical extension.
This helps explain why the common question, “Do admissions officers read every essay?”, is becoming harder to answer with a satisfying yes or no. A human may read it. Several humans may encounter pieces of it. Software may score aspects of it. An algorithm may eventually summarize it for someone else.
None of this means the essay no longer matters. It just suggests something stranger: the most personal part of the college application is entering an admissions process that is becoming less personal by necessity.
For years, students have been told to imagine the person reading their essay. They may soon need to imagine the system reading it.
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.
