Last week one of our counselors mentioned something that, at first, seemed almost comical.
A rising senior had spent weeks researching one of her top-choice colleges. She had attended virtual information sessions, read faculty biographies and started outlining responses to the supplemental essays she expected to write, assuming they would be the same as last year. Then the university announced that one of those essays was no longer required.
The assumption was that she’d be thrilled. After all, who celebrates having more work to do during application season? Instead, she sounded puzzled.
“I thought they wanted to know who I was.”
I’ve spent the past twenty years helping students navigate highly selective admissions, and I’ve learned that questions like this are often more revealing than the answers. Her confusion wasn’t really about one essay. It reflected something larger that’s happening across higher education.
Several selective universities have announced they’re reducing or eliminating supplemental essays, pointing to two understandable reasons. Artificial intelligence has made it increasingly difficult to know who actually wrote what, and colleges genuinely want to reduce unnecessary burdens on applicants. Those explanations are reasonable. They also happen to coincide with another reality: colleges are competing for a shrinking pool of students, and every additional requirement discourages someone from applying.
The result is a curious paradox. Applying becomes easier precisely as getting admitted becomes harder.
Most discussions stop there, treating supplemental essays as writing samples whose usefulness has been diminished by AI. But after watching this process evolve over two decades, I’ve come to think supplemental essays served another purpose that received far less attention.
They created a particular kind of friction—not the bureaucratic kind that exists for its own sake, but the kind that reveals priorities.
Every additional essay forced a decision. If a student devoted ten hours to writing for one college, those were ten hours they couldn’t spend applying somewhere else. Time is the one resource every applicant lacks during the fall of senior year. Long before an admissions officer read the first sentence, students had already revealed something meaningful simply by choosing where to invest it. In that sense, supplemental essays weren’t merely evaluating applicants. They were asking applicants to evaluate colleges.
That’s the signal colleges are losing. If an admissions office can no longer trust that an essay reflects a student’s own thinking, the information it once provided becomes far less reliable. Removing the requirement isn’t an abandonment of selectivity so much as an acknowledgment that one of its most useful signals has become increasingly difficult to interpret.
Institutions rarely stop measuring something simply because one measurement breaks down. They substitute another. Colleges already know who visits campus, who opens emails, who spends time on virtual tours and, increasingly, who appears statistically likely to enroll. They still want to understand student interest. They’ve simply begun looking for it somewhere else.
Which brings me back to our student who wondered whether the college still wanted to know who she was. It did. The institution hadn’t stopped looking for authenticity. It had simply stopped believing that a supplemental essay was the most reliable place to find 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.
