I’m not gonna lie, I love AI. I don’t love everything about it, but overall I see it as mostly gold.
Nevertheless, if you’re reading this for advice about using AI to write your college applications, I bring bad news. It won’t, and it can’t.
I’m not an expert in all the educational AI tools out there—can anyone keep up?!—but I’ve played with a good half dozen or more different tools and even got hooked into a Coursiv course on mastering the higher-level optional features across the most popular AI’s today. I suspected a lot of it would be fluffy—and a lot of it was—especially the Ad Libs style “playground” to practice newly acquired skills—but it was worth its price in teaching about the value of giving super precise instructions and parameters every which way you can think of: The more detailed information you feed in, the more precise and nuanced the product you get out.
So let”s say you plan to use ChatGPT to write some or all of your essays for your college applications. You instruct ChatGPT as follows: “Please write a 250-650 word (that’s the CommonApp’s and standard length in 2026) and two or three 250-word essays (typical length for supplement essays) that will get me into colleges on my list, like UMiami, Tufts, UMich, Swarthmore (my father went there), Penn, and Florida State. I’m an A- student with some B+’s and I play soccer and I’ve been in two plays, and I’ve ladled soup for the homeless at a local shelter for three years in a row. Oh, and please make me sound smart because they’re hard to get into.”
Not bad instructions, right? AI is super-intelligent, right? It’ll definitely spit back something better than I can do, right?
Wrong! You will get back schlock and admissions officers will smell the schlock in the opening two sentences. Most of the essays will probably mention your father going to Swarthmore. Won’t work. At all.
“But,” you may quickly object, “I’m not new to technology. I’ve taken the same AI classes as you—more even, cuz I’m way younger than you!—and I know exactly what instructions to give ChatGPT, and I can set up a ChatGPT Project, upload as many files as a I want to it (yup, my parents said they’d spring for the pro version), I’ll create multiple Chat themes like academics, sports, community service, my personal values, my dream college, my possible plans for after college, my travel experiences and what I got out of each one, why I like individual schools, what majors and programs appeal to me and why, which student organization on each particular campus attract me most and why, how I expect to use my college education moving forward, what I can bring to each teaching and learning campus; then I’ll do research and provide a deep detailed dive for each separate theme. And then I bet it might spit out something interesting.”
And to that I would say,
GREAT! Yet I’m willing to bet the whole farm that if you’re articulate and specific enough with examples from your personal experience and willing to invest the sweat equity it would take to instruct ChatGPT in this manner, then you are way too smart to have the computer do it for you. And why would you?
See also: AI Can Level Up Your Education and Your GPA, but It Won’t Get You into College and To Use or Not to Use AI on College & Grad School Applications
Check out the great savings on Early Bird Registration for 14 CommonApp Boot Camps Summer ’26, already the best deal in college admissions!
