As students rely on AI in the college search, admissions offices scramble to keep up | CNN Business

New York — 

The college admissions essay is in a very weird place. It’s impossible to say just how many of them are now written by AI, but at this point, experts agree that it’s a lot of them. And while colleges generally frown upon that practice, they’re using AI to evaluate the essays, too

It’s all adding up to ascramble to stay aheadover the future of who gets to go to the university of their choice

Kate Gilbertson, who graduated from UC Berkeley in 2025 and edits college applications full time, said that lately she’s received a lot of drafts that don’t have the usual quirks of teenage writing

“Those little moments of flaw tell me that this is still a 17-year-old’s writing, right?” Gilbertsonsaid

It’s not just essays. Though ChatGPT has been out for just four years, AI has already reshaped the entire college admissions process from top to bottom

Now, as the January 1 deadline for the Common App approaches, more and more high schoolers are using AI in their college applications and even turning to chatbots instead of college counselors, who often charge thousands of dollars for theirservices

Meanwhile, colleges are rushing to update their AI usage guidelines and rethink the future of the essay. Yet they are also testing out AI evaluations of their own to help sift through thousands, if not tens of thousands, of applications

Students, meanwhile, see an obvious double standard: If some universities are using AI to grade essays, why can’t I? If everyone is using AI to get ahead, why should I get left behind?

Admissions offices around the country are rushing to figure out guidelines for AI use in applications, and each one looks a little bit different

But “students are moving faster than admissions offices” when it comes to AI, Ashley Pallie, California Institute of Technology’s dean of undergraduate admissions, said

CalTech, which is at the forefront of AI research, takes a nuanced approach. Its admissions office whittled down thousands of applicants to less than 450 admitted students last year

For Pallie, the process is much more art than science. She said an AI bot couldn’t replace the job of professional essay readers anytime soon

While “replacing your unique voice and tone with AI generated content” is unethical, the school said that “generating questions or exercises to help kick start the brainstorming process” is okay

The University of Pennsylvania warned against AI usage for letters of recommendation written by counselors and teachers

Colleges are also differing in how they grade essays, with some using AI tools themselves

“You actually can’t develop the perfect formula that’s going to choose the right students for you. You do need humans who are reading the humans who submitted their application,” Pallie said

However, CalTech does use an AI that reads students’ scientific research and asks them questions that faculty later views

Major public universities like Virginia Tech, which received a record 57,6222 first-year applications for 2025, are testing out AI to keep up with the mass application volume

That experimentation hasn’t always worked. UNC-Chapel Hill reversed its decision to auto-score application essays based on writing quality. The student newspaper reported that a university spokesperson said that “the widespread use of AI-assisted writing tools was the factor diminishing the usefulness of AI essay ratings.”

More colleges are dropping supplemental essays altogetherfor this application cycle

Tulane said that it is no longer requiring a “Why Tulane?” essay. While spokesperson Michael Strecker told CNN the essay hasn’t been that important in the selection process in recent years, he “can confirm that concerns about AI did play a role in this decision.”

Sophie Sajnani, who graduated college in 2025, founded a boutique college consulting firm. Sajnani discourages her students from using AI to help brainstorm, but doesn’t mind when it writes for them

When asked if there’s a concern that all the essays will sound the same, she said her students are AI-native and have trained their AI chatbots to sound like them. And she said there’s been a spike in enrollment in her firm’s AI literacy program

“The reason we still have the admissions essay is to show a moment of growth. I think it’s less so about the writing and more so to show situations and how a student has grown from it,” Sajnani said

Some students aren’t totally sold on AI writing, but see its benefits for other parts of the admissions process

“I feel like when using AI, people want to think that you want to cheat the process,” Anisah Ali, a high school junior in Washington, told CNN. “I see it more as you want to open up ideas in your brain that you wouldn’t think about doing yourself.”

Pallie does see a distant future where college essays don’t play as big a role. But, in a way, the replacement is even more person-facing than the essay

“In our ideal world, everyone would do an interview of some sort,” Pallie said. But the style of that interview? “Human.”

But not all uses of AI in the college application process are as controversial

The college admissions process begins with deciding which schools are the best fit. In this case, AI can help students who are putting together applications on their own or whose families can’t afford to spend thousands on private college consultants

This year, ChatGPT launched a college planner for teens. OpenAI said the most popular prompts included “ask questions to develop my ideas,” “give feedback on my draft” and “help me check my evidence.”

“For a lot of students, AI is the college counselor they can’t afford,” Michael Koppenheffer, chief innovation officer of enrollment solutions at EAB, told CNN. “They can get more information and they get more detailed guidance than they ever could before.”

EAB found that AI plays the an outsized role in influencing what schools students applied to, compared to restudents surveyed in its AI report said they used ChatGPT when asked what AI tools they used in their college search

Christine Wilson, who already utilizes AI to help run her marketing agency in Virginia, at first hired a college counselor for her son, Ronan, who “built a list for him of initial schools that then we ended up kind of redoing ourselves using AI.” She used Claude to make a spreadsheet of the 22 universities Ronan applied to last year

The spreadsheet ran an analysis of the cost of attendance for each school, taking stats like income and potential aid into account. It saved Wilson “many, many hours of research,” she said

Wilson and her son ran a separate analysis for colleges that had football, Greek life and prestigious business schools. (Ronan ended up committing to The University of Florida.)

Bunmi Emenanjo’s 17-year-old daughter has specific criteria for her future university: It has to be urban, offer merit aid and have a diverse student body

While she hired a college counselor for her older son, this year they are relying on Claude

“It’s just easier to use AI to search for that versus going through each school and digging up that information,” Emenanjo said. But for her family, the application itself will use more of the traditional methods – she said her daughter won’t be using AI for her essays

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Source: www.cnn.com