How AI Is Reshaping The Elite College Admissions Landscape

Forbes

13-05-2025

Stanford, California, USA - March 17, 2019: Aerial view of Stanford University in Stanford ... More California. Stanford is a private university founded in 1885 by Leland and Jane Stanford.
The college admissions landscape has changed dramatically over the last five years, due in large part to significant political, economic, and legislative shifts. But technological advances have also had a dynamic impact on the college admissions process, and the explosion of artificial intelligence promises to have far-reaching implications for admissions officers' evaluations of application materials. While many students and parents have embraced these tools to assist with everything from building a college list to writing essays, it is critical for families to consider the potential impact of AI on their college applications—and the application process as a whole.
What AI Could Mean for Admissions Decisions
AI writing is everywhere—from the blogs and social media content we consume to the search results that appear on Google. Further, AI writing—from its overall paragraph structure to its syntax and sentence structure—is highly formulaic. Admissions officers who read hundreds of essays a day can easily differentiate between writing produced by AI and a student's own voice; this means that they are well aware that a significant portion of students are using AI in some capacity in their applications.
The ubiquity of AI will likely lead admissions officers to lean even further into an already holistic admissions process. The overwhelming reliance on AI tools may lead admissions committees to deprioritize the personal statement and supplemental essays as true representations of a student's authentic voice. Like with other elements of the application—such as standardized test scores and extracurriculars—whose importance has fluctuated amidst debates about their ability to equitably demonstrate a student's college preparedness, written materials may carry less weight moving forward. This doesn't mean that admissions officers will be permissive of AI use in any formal or explicit way, but that they will recognize its widespread implementation and examine the whole of a student's application rather than any single element of it.
But AI is also impacting college admissions decision-making in other ways. According to a January report from The Daily Tar Heel, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill used AI tools to score students' writing on the basis of 'the quality of word choice, sentence structure, sentence variability, vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, length, and more in an applicant's essay.' According to the admissions office, the AI screening serves as a first layer of review before admissions officers read essays individually. UNC is hardly the sole institution implementing this method—a 2023 survey cited by Inside Higher Education found that 50% of colleges surveyed were using AI in their review process, a number which has likely increased in the intervening years. While colleges have been notoriously vague about the particular ways in which these tools are trained to evaluate student writing, it is important for students to be aware of their use and devote significant time and effort to editing and polishing their materials before submission.
How AI Should Impact Students' Admissions Strategy
Students should take these technological shifts into account as they develop their college admissions strategy. Artificial intelligence is a useful tool and it can certainly be helpful as students build their applicant profiles, but the key to using AI both ethically and effectively is understanding what it is best used for. While it may be an asset as students scale their passion project, identify MOOCs and podcasts to learn more about their area of interest, or cull data about colleges on their list, it is not a storytelling tool and should not be used for writing personal or supplemental essays. Ultimately, anything that requires innovative reasoning or critical thinking should be completed without the use of AI tools.
Beyond the fact that using AI tools to write is generally frowned upon and considered to be unethical, AI writing has become so ubiquitous that using AI or modeling one's work off of it is a surefire way to make your materials blend into a sea of other cookie-cutter essays. This is true even for students who do not regurgitate a full ChatGPT essay. For instance, a lot of students turn to AI for proofreading by inputting their entire essay and asking it to fix grammar and syntax errors, assuming that it functions like Grammarly. However, students and parents don't realize that ChatGPT and other AI platforms will change their language in a way that is highly formulaic and therefore very detectable.
Conversely, while admissions offices are more adept at spotting unoriginal writing, they are equally as skilled at detecting authentic critical thinking and originality. Because of the surplus of algorithmic, formulaic AI language, students who learn to write elegantly, experiment with form and language, and subvert expectations in their prose will stand out in the competitive admissions landscape.
Students should take a similar critical approach to using AI tools to craft other aspects of their applicant profiles. While it may be tempting to ask ChatGPT for advice on pursuing activities related to their intended major, students should keep in mind that the lists of activities AI generates are often highly standardized and lacking in the interdisciplinarity, creativity, and originality that admissions officers will look for in a student's Activities List. While such a list can be a good starting point, it should not be the only step a student takes to develop their long-term admissions strategy.
How Students Can Use AI Ethically—And Effectively
This is not to say that AI tools cannot be an asset for students seeking to gain admission to top schools. The most effective uses of AI in STEM subjects include rapidly culling, synthesizing, organizing, and collecting data. This is an asset for students even outside of STEM fields. If a student has organized a large-scale volunteer event, they might use AI to create a searchable Excel sheet of vendors and participants. Students can turn to AI to scrape data from Common Data Sets and school websites to research admissions requirements and average scores for schools on their list; some might conduct long-term independent research projects, mobilizing AI tools to represent their data in more effective ways.
Likewise, students studying history, sociology, or philosophy would benefit from using AI to identify sources, wade through vast amounts of archival materials, or transpose data from one format to another. Researchers in both fields should see this as a building block for their research, keeping in mind that any AI summary will not offer critical thinking, sophisticated analysis, or complex evaluative skills, but it may provide the foundation for researchers to bring these qualities to their research without expending massive amounts of time sorting through data or research materials.
While artificial intelligence has become an unavoidable and often helpful tool in many sectors, admissions officers at elite institutions still want to hear what you think in your own voice—not what a language model has generated on your behalf. Students who want to stand out in the admissions process need to start developing an original approach to the college admissions process that reflects their unique perspective early in their high school career.