TCU saw 14% jump in applications after cutting two essay prompts
Several selective U.S. colleges are eliminating or reducing supplemental essay requirements for undergraduate applicants, a shift that admissions officers and consultants say reflects the growing unreliability of student-written responses in the age of artificial intelligence and a desire to ease application stress for a shrinking pool of prospective students.
Tulane University, Washington University in St. Louis and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are among the schools reducing the number of essays applicants must submit, according to a report from The Wall Street Journal. The University of Virginia, the University of Miami and the University of Georgia have also removed supplemental essays.
The moves are likely to increase application volumes, admissions consultants said, making admissions more competitive and lowering acceptance rates.
“This is happening in part because schools are trying to become more competitive,” said Caroline Koppelman, founder of an admissions consulting firm. For students deciding where to apply, an extra essay “can be the straw that breaks the camel’s back a little bit, or at least the straw that makes you not apply to that school.”
Texas Christian University experienced a roughly 14% jump in applications after removing two of its supplemental essays last year, the Journal reported. Heath Einstein, TCU’s vice provost of enrollment management, said the school’s aim in expanding application numbers is simply to increase enrollment, not to lower its admit rate. He said responses to the questions the school cut — about its values and inclusivity — lacked originality.
“You still see a narrowing to the mean,” Einstein said. “Students are still going to respond in ways that they think we want to hear.”
A lower admissions rate improves schools’ rankings and “protects their prestige,” said Christopher Rim, chief executive of admissions firm Command Education. “A lot of that is really artificial.”
Growing use of AI has made the essays less useful for colleges, admissions officers said. Tulane’s dean of admissions told the school’s counseling network that the tool “has compromised our ability to discern which ‘Why Tulane’ responses are artificially polished,” according to a note the Journal reviewed.
A letter signed last month by more than 1,000 University of California professors, urging the system to reinstate SAT and ACT requirements, also flagged AI as a reason essays are becoming less reliable. MSI previously reported that the UC faculty group cited a sharp decline in student math readiness — the share of students needing elementary-math remediation before taking precalculus rose from 0.5% to 8.5% between 2020 and 2025, the same year the UC system stopped requiring entrance exams.
WashU eliminated one optional essay this year. Applicants felt obligated to respond but sometimes repeated what they had already written elsewhere in the application, said Grace Chapin James, assistant vice provost for undergraduate admissions.
“We just felt like if we were stressing people out…we might as well remove that from our process,” James said. The school kept its other supplemental essay, which asks why students chose their major.
Some admissions advisers said cutting supplemental essays will add to the ballooning ranks of students who get deferred and wait-listed as young people apply to more colleges.
“They’re just kind of winging it and throwing a bunch of applications,” said Trey Chappell, director of the consulting firm College X-ing.
Many schools still value supplemental essays and will likely keep them, said Ethan Sawyer, founder of College Essay Guy. The essays can help determine whether students would be a good fit, he said.
Schools that have long used essays to help gauge students’ interest now have other ways to predict whether they will attend. Some colleges track whether students visit their website, how long they spend on virtual campus tours or whether they open emailed links, said Brett Schraeder, who works on enrollment modeling for the education consulting firm EAB.
“People may not realize the extensive amount of data that the colleges collect,” said Maria Laskaris, a former dean of admissions at Dartmouth College and now a senior private counselor for Top Tier Admissions.
Kathleen Keesey, who recently graduated from high school near Denver, wrote 29 supplemental essays for admission plus dozens more for scholarships and honors programs. Her attitude was to “just grind these essays out.” She spent months on the effort, refusing to duplicate submissions. She said she found it off-putting when applications didn’t have supplemental essays and worried how she would distinguish herself.
“I wasn’t relieved,” Keesey said. “I was wondering, ‘Why aren’t you asking me more questions?’ There’s so much more I have to tell you.”