The College Essay Crisis Is Real—And Deeper Than We Think

AI threatens authentic writing assessment, but we're also losing irreplaceable opportunities for self-discovery and resilience building

It’s mid-July, and somewhere a seventeen-year-old is typing “From a young age…” into a Google Doc, then deleting it. The cursor blinks like a silent alarm. The student is grappling with that unique essayistic genre that is the personal statement, which since the early 20th-century has been a staple of the college application process. In under 650 words, teenagers are asked to mine a few years of young life for profound insights about resilience and growth, stretch the limits of their blossoming writing abilities, and make the case that, after much soul searching and reflection, they truly do belong on the college campus of their dreams.

Or maybe not. Maybe ChatGPT can do it for them? 

This year, the growing chorus of alarm about artificial intelligence destroying the college admissions essay has softened into an ominous fermata. Many of us have accepted that AI use in writing is ubiquitous. In my role as an educational consultant helping students to write these reflective essays, I see these concerns as valid. The temptation to use ChatGPT or other Large Language Model-based tools to write the college essay–or any academic work for that matter–has become overwhelming. 

In an Education Week article from exactly one year ago, Alyson Klein reported that 1 in 3 high schoolers used AI for essay help in 2024. Given the surge of AI adoption since then, not to mention .edu focused programs that Google and OpenAI have rolled out with colleges, that number will grow substantially this year. 

According to a 2025 survey on Student Generative AI use by the UK’s Higher Education Policy Institute, 92% of students now use AI in some form, up from 66% in 2024. Academic integrity is thus approaching a tipping point: 88% of students have used AI for assessments, up from 53% in 2024, and 89% of students admit to using AI tools like ChatGPT for homework. Without passing judgment on the merits here–I fervently agree that we need to prepare students to thrive in an AI first world, and support the great work of organizations like aiEDU, AI for Education, and AI-for-Education.org–it’s also easy to imagine a very near future in which every student is using LLMs for everything. 

Figure on AI use from HEPI Survey

As colleges scramble to adapt, admissions offices are the front line. The HEPI study noted that beginning last year 80% of colleges had intended to use AI in some form in the admissions process. As I’ve written elsewhere including my former role as an executive at Polygence, a student research program, research has shown AI to be as effective as human readers in identifying key personality traits like goal pursuit and prosocial purpose that rank amongst the strongest predictors of college success. For schools who now face a six-figure stack of applications to process in a few short months, a means of standardized, consistent assessment for Admissions Deans may become more and more appealing when the alternative is trying to align the unique subjective judgment of an army of seasonal essay readers. 

Meanwhile, other variables are moved around. Following the elimination of some DEI related essay prompts after the 2023 Supreme Court ruling against race-based admissions practices, some elite schools are asking students to write about their ability to disagree with their peers. Colleges like Cornell University and Carnegie Mellon University will begin accepting portfolio's from Schoolhouse.world, a tutoring platform founded by Sal Khan of Khan Academy, where students can log hours of civil dialogue with others to demonstrate their ability to listen, think, and argue dispassionately. 

Other schools are experimenting in the other direction. Duke University, for one, decided to stop giving essays numerical ratings in 2024 because, according to Dean Christoph Guttentag, they could no longer assume “that the essay is an accurate reflection of the student’s actual writing ability.” Students, for their part, feel trapped in an arms race where, as one explained, “If you don't use it, you’re at a disadvantage.”

Not only that, but the probabilistic outputs from LLMs also threaten the diversity of voices and viewpoints that admissions readers seek in the essays themselves. Research from Cornell found that AI-generated essays sound predominantly male and privileged. Absorbing all this makes a recent headline in the San Francisco Chronicle like “AI is Killing the College Admissions Essay” sound far less alarmist than similar opinions written just after ChatGPT was released in 2022. 

Such diagnoses are real and true and deeply concerning. But there is also another dimension to this crisis that’s equally important but receiving far less attention. We’re not just watching the dissolution of a reliable way to assess student writing; we're also losing one of the most widespread rites of passage for reflection and resilience that a psychologically stressed generation desperately needs. 

Joan Didion, undated, image credit New York Public Library

We’re Also Losing The Process of Becoming

Since its introduction by elite colleges in the 1910s and its rise to widespread requirements through the Common Application, the personal essay has always served a dual purpose. Yes, it allows admissions officers to evaluate writing ability and gain insight into applicants. That is the product that college admissions counselors from great organizations like IECA Independent Educational Consultants Association work hard to coax out of students. Seasoned experts like Ethan Sawyer of College Essay Guy have developed reams of excellent brainstorming and procedural guides to help college aspirants write something meaningful and authentic. The personal essay in this sense is an essential output of the college application process. 

But it has also functioned as a rare and powerful input for student growth: a structured opportunity for young people to engage in the kind of deep personal reflection–through productive, challenging conversations with counselors, parents, friends and other people who care about them and their future–that builds psychological resilience and self-awareness.

When Joan Didion wrote, “I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means,” she captured something essential about reflective writing that no AI can replicate. One of my favorite writers on art and belonging and a prophet of Bay Area intellectual life, Rebecca Solnit describes the writing process as “a way of getting lost that might lead to finding something unexpected.” The wrestling with language, the fumbling toward articulation: this struggle itself confers enormous developmental benefits. In my teaching, from high school French to film classes at Stanford University, I’ve seen this struggle help students to develop a stronger voice–a stronger sense of self–in a single 11-week academic term.

I’m not alone in marveling at such transformations. Research consistently demonstrates that reflective writing serves as a powerful tool for identity formation during crucial adolescent years. Students engaged in authentic self-reflection develop increased metacognitive awareness, enhanced emotional intelligence, improved critical thinking, and greater academic success across multiple measures. More critically, they learn to construct coherent narratives about their lives, recognize their own agency, and develop meaning-making capabilities essential for psychological well-being. 

One of my favorite studies on this matter comes from Adam Galinsky and Laura Kray, Professors at Columbia and UC Berkeley Business Schools, respectively. It explored how such moments provide opportunities for “counterfactual thinking” by asking college students to imagine how things might have turned out differently if they had gone to a different school. They found this simple exercise made participants rate their college experience as more meaningful. They were more likely to agree with statements like coming to that specific college has “added meaning to my life,” and helped define who they were. 

This research suggests that reflecting on experience with this what-if? mindset requires a greater investment in the “sense-making” process than merely thinking about the meaning of the experience. In other words, when we take the time to recognize how our past decisions have changed the course of our lives, we seem to strengthen what psychologists call the “internal locus of control” and thereby the feeling that we can positively influence the direction our lives will take in the future. Writing an essay on a challenge you’ve overcome can create a fierce feeling of empowerment. I’d rate that at least as meaningful as getting a note from an old friend that says you mean a lot to them, or completing an athletic achievement like running a marathon (or maybe a 5k, your mileage may vary). 

https://bfi.uchicago.edu/working-paper/2023-131/

The Irreplaceable Developmental Checkpoint

All to say that the college application process has historically facilitated a unique developmental moment, perhaps one of the few remaining structured opportunities in American education for young people to pause and reflect deeply on their experiences, growth, and aspirations. It’s a natural checkpoint where students are prompted to look back on everything they’ve done, describe in their own words who they are in the present, and articulate who they want to become.

This process helps young people recognize that they have agency and control over their lives in ways that are sometimes easy to forget in a fast-paced culture driven by external validation. Consider that the average Gen Zer spends 5+ hours a day on their phones. They are bombarded with comparisons to picture perfect influencers that has left many 1) wishing they never had social media to begin with and 2) also feeling trapped into using it. University of Chicago researchers have identified this dynamic as a “collective trap” that confers “negative utility” (i.e. personal harm) to people if they engage and if they abstain. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. 

Crafting personal narratives for personal use, not for social media, provides students a rare opportunity to break out of that cycle, if only for a moment. They can see that they’ve overcome challenges, that different decisions could have led to different outcomes, that their choices matter. This recognition builds what psychologists call “narrative coherence,” the ability to construct meaningful stories about one’s life that support psychological resilience. 

Other educational research confirms that personal narrative writing supports crucial developmental tasks: helping adolescents integrate past experiences with future aspirations, develop self-understanding, articulate personal values, and build the reflective capacity necessary for lifelong learning and adaptation.

The Current Crisis: Two Problems, Not One

The institutional response to AI reveals how we’re rightly grappling with one immediate problem while another one hidden behind it is building to terminal velocity. When a tutoring company contacted the top 30 universities about AI policies for admissions essays, 25 schools never responded. Among those that did, responses ranged from zero-tolerance policies (Brown and USC promise immediate rejection for any AI use) to vague guidelines that leave students in what Georgia Institute of Technology Rick Clark calls “an ethical gray area.”

This chaotic response makes sense when we frame the issue solely as an assessment problem: How do we fairly evaluate student writing when we can't be sure students wrote it? But it misses the equally important question: How do we preserve the developmental benefits of reflective writing in an AI-saturated world?

The assessment problem is real and requires creative solutions, fast. Colleges need reliable ways to evaluate applicants, and essays have long served as windows into student character, thinking, and fit. There are great AI detection efforts underway by the likes of startups like Turnitin and GPTZero. But those efforts will always be chasing the most recent updates from frontier AI models; indeed, in most cases, the detection tools are themselves built on the LLMs whose outputs they’re trying to trace. This structural disadvantage has led to a degree of false positives–meaning that they accuse students of using AI when they have not–so high that colleges like Vanderbilt have decided to turn off AI detection tools in order to spare the 4% of the student population the injustice of being falsely accused of academic dishonesty. 

That leaves many administrators and faculty dealing with the reality of revamping their assessment paradigms, if not their entire curriculum, overnight. So how do we juggle this urgent concern with the deeper developmental threats of eliminating reflective writing? If we simply abandon essay requirements or treat them as irrelevant, as many on both sides of the political spectrum have argued, we eliminate one of the few remaining spaces in education designed specifically for structured self-reflection and identity exploration.

A Both/And Solution Framework

The most promising responses would address both dimensions of this crisis simultaneously. Rather than choosing between assessment validity and developmental value, we could imagine approaches that preserve both.

Process-based assessment offers one path forward. Instead of evaluating only final products, institutions could require documentation of the writing journey—early drafts, reflection on revisions, explanation of choices made. This approach maintains assessment rigor while preserving the reflective process that builds resilience and self-awareness, and reminds me of the kind of instructional design Vanderbilt Professor Andy Van Schaack has been championing since the release of ChatGPT. 

Supervised reflection sessions could combine authenticity verification with guided self-discovery. Students might participate in virtual writing workshops where they engage with prompts designed to elicit genuine reflection while ensuring the work remains their own.

Portfolio approaches, already used by 135+ schools through the Coalition for College platform, emphasize growth over time, requiring students to show development and reflection across multiple pieces. A subject I’ve written about before, this format naturally resists AI shortcuts while promoting the kind of sustained self-examination that builds psychological strength.

Video essays, now offered by Brown, Duke, Wake Forest, and the University of Chicago allow students to showcase authentic personality while making AI assistance less relevant. More importantly, the process of preparing and recording these responses often involves significant self-reflection and identity clarification. Of course, they could always use AI to help them write the script, but for those of us who have watched students read canned reports into a camera, it’s much easier to separate the sincere from the fake. (We can get into the forthcoming AI video truth apocalypse brought on by Veo3 and HeyGen at another time.)

Recovering Resilience Through Reflection

Some educators are pioneering approaches that use AI as a tool for deeper reflection rather than a shortcut around it. I have personally explored AI editing assistants for the college process developed by Sups, ESAI, and Athena AI that have made admirable ethical commitments to ensure the student writing process maintains both academic integrity and the "productive struggle" mentioned above. "Rhetorical prompting" techniques help students craft intentional prompts for AI, then critically examine the outputs to understand what’s missing from their authentic voice. Students learn to question AI results, identify where machine-generated text feels hollow or generic, and articulate what makes their own perspective unique. 

A thoughtful, probing example of this work is on display in Princeton Professor D. Graham Burnett’s The New Yorker article, Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?, which in my view actually provides some measure of hope for a return to educational models that require students to define a good life, well-lived. As Frank Bruni lamented just this week, that line of questioning has become evasive in discussions of the ROI of this or that bachelor’s degree. Of course, the price of college is absolutely a critical aspect of the work that college counselors do with families, but life is also certainly more than the sum of returns on various investments.

As studies have shown, developmental benefits come from the wrestling itself, the zone of proximal development, not from producing a perfect final product. When students engage authentically with questions about their identity, values, and aspirations, even with AI assistance, they still develop the reflective capacities that build resilience. 

Approaching assessment from this perspective could help to maintain an essential intellectual struggle while also better preparing students for a world in which AI is ascendent. Students still wrestle with fundamental questions—Who am I? What matters to me? How have I grown? Where am I going?—but they hopefully learn to use AI as a thinking partner rather than a replacement for thinking. 

The School of Athens 

What This Means for the Future

As we venture into admissions cycle 2025 with these alarms sounding, here are a few thoughts to help different constituencies to be clear-eyed about what is possible: 

For educators: We should explore curricula that explicitly teaches reflective writing as a life skill, not just an admissions requirement or a way of proving you read the textbook. 

It’s already clear that AI outperforms all but the most elevated experts in the most analytical and knowledge-demonstration tasks, from doing white collar consulting work to writing an essay on Aristotle. Its ability to write code seems to be precipitating the collapse of the computer science degree, which until recently had the golden ticket to a good-paying career.

But those tasks are categorically different from writing about who you are and who you want to become. Students should understand that the capacity for self-examination and meaning-making will serve them throughout their lives, regardless of where they attend college or what job they do. 

Perhaps the personal essay should not be something high schoolers rush through once sometime before applications are due; perhaps colleges could begin accepting one of these essays for each year of high school, like successive intellectual time capsules that would chart the "growth trajectories" University of Pennsylvania psychologist Adam Grant has written about in his book Hidden Potential. 

For parents: Support your children in viewing the application process as an opportunity for growth rather than just a hurdle to overcome. The insights gained through authentic reflection about values, goals, and identity will matter long after admissions decisions are made.

For admissions professionals: Consider hybrid approaches that preserve both assessment validity and developmental value. Focus on what essays can still reveal about character, resilience, and growth mindset while adapting methods to ensure authenticity.

For students: Remember that the capacity to reflect on your experiences, articulate your values, and envision your future cannot be outsourced to any algorithm. These are essential life skills that will serve you regardless of college outcomes.

Beyond Admissions: Building Resilient Citizens

Of course, this crisis extends far beyond college admissions into fundamental questions about human development in an AI-saturated world, something I write about in my substack on art, artificial intelligence, and their relation to our concepts of creativity. While I can’t slay our collective existential dread here, we can at least expose those deeper harms that follow from the dissolution of authentic personal essay writing. If we abandon reflective practices because machines can mimic their outputs, we risk creating a generation that struggles with the very skills they’ll need to navigate an uncertain future. The ability to examine their experiences, learn from setbacks, articulate their values, and maintain agency in their own lives–who else but us will help young people to develop these skills? 

People who can construct coherent, meaningful narratives about their lives demonstrate greater resilience, better mental health, and more adaptive responses to challenges. The college essay process, at its best, serves as training for this essential human capacity.