Is The College Application Supplemental Essay Dying Out?
By Christopher Rim | July 02, 2026, 01:36pm EDT
In recent weeks, a wave of prestigious schools has announced that they will no longer require students to submit supplemental essays. The University of Miami, Tulane University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have confirmed the elimination of their essays for the 2026–27 cycle. Cornell University, meanwhile, retained its school-specific prompts but retired its broader university-wide essay. These institutions join schools such as TCU and UVA, which eliminated supplemental essays in the last admissions cycle.
Many students will likely breathe a sigh of relief at this news. The supplements have long been some of the most labor-intensive parts of an application—school-specific essays ask applicants to articulate, in anywhere from 150 to 650 words, aspects of their background, experiences, interests, and why they belong on a particular campus. Universities often require numerous essays (Stanford notoriously requires students to write eight supplements), and as students apply to more schools, the effort and time required for writing becomes all the more overwhelming.
Yet these essays, laborious though they are, convey something that other elements of the application don’t. They offer a unique opportunity for students to connect their experiences, backgrounds, and interests to the specific schools and programs to which they are applying. While students have the opportunity to share their voice in the Common App essay, the supplements are unique in that they often call for more creative thinking, original and unique responses, and direct evidence of a student’s fit for a particular institution.
The schools making this change have largely framed it as a matter of reducing stress and redundancy. In announcing its own decision, UGA’s Office of Admission, for instance, wrote: “we believe the one essay response gives us what we need in our evaluation process. We hope that this decision takes some stress out of the admissions process for both students and parents.”
Undoubtedly, the rise of generative AI over the last few years has contributed to this shift. Recent research has found that AI tools have resulted in college application essays that tend toward increasingly homogenized language. This generic writing makes it harder for admissions readers to distinguish authentic voices from machine-made prose, and harder for supplements, specifically, to offer the differentiating insights they were designed to illuminate. Duke University explicitly pointed to the explosion of AI-generated writing as a driving reason for minimizing the importance of college essays in the university’s admissions evaluations beginning in the 2024–25 cycle. While Duke still requires supplemental essays and considers them in admissions decisions, they no longer receive a numerical score.
It is also not a coincidence that so many of these changes have followed the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling striking down race-conscious admissions. In the cycles since, numerous schools subtly reworked their supplemental prompts, many of which had explicitly invited students to reflect on their identities, backgrounds, and communities in ways that became legally and politically fraught in the ruling’s aftermath. Retiring the supplement altogether allows institutions to avoid the minefields that can come with more personal, identity-related disclosures in the admissions process.
While the intention behind these changes is understandable, a more widespread retirement of supplemental essays could have far-reaching implications for how admissions decisions are made at top institutions. These changes are landing at a moment when standardized testing and other quantifiable academic metrics are surging back to the forefront of admissions decisions, after years of being deliberately downplayed in favor of “holistic” reviews. The combined effect could represent a pendulum swing away from the holistic, narrative-driven evaluation model that has defined selective admissions for the past decade and toward a more standardized, academically-focused method of comparing applicants.
Of course, the elimination of supplements has not yet become the norm. School-specific essays remain an important factor in the college application at many top universities, particularly the Ivies, as a way of assessing institutional fit and preparedness for a particular program. But the fact that flagship public universities and well-regarded private research institutions are moving away from them indicates that broader shifts may be on the horizon regarding what admissions offices believe they need to know about an applicant, and how much of that information should come from numbers versus narrative.
Originally published on Forbes on July 02, 2026
