AI and College Essays: What Your Dream School Actually Allows

College application season brings one question that keeps coming up more than almost any other right now: can I use AI to write my essay? This article breaks all of that down to understand how AI should and shouldn't be used in your applications.

Is using AI helpful?

The numbers are larger than most people realize. In a 2024 foundry10 study of the 2023–24 application cycle, about a third of applicants said they used AI somewhere in the essay process. Among those students, roughly half used it to brainstorm ideas and about a third to generate a first draft. With AI becoming such a normal part of the process, the real question isn't whether to use it or not, but rather how to use it. A study out of Cornell and Carnegie Mellon looked at tens of thousands of college application essays submitted to a selective university and found that students who used AI to generate their writing produced more generic essays, making it easier for admissions officers to detect. A separate Cornell University study comparing 30,000 human-written essays to AI-generated ones came to the same conclusion: AI essays are generic and easy to distinguish from real writing. On the other hand, students who used AI as a feedback and brainstorming tool performed significantly better. To summarize, how you use it makes all the difference.

Why the Essay Actually Matters

In a 2019 National Association of College Admissions Counseling survey of 220 universities, 24 percent of schools rated essays as being of "considerable importance," second only to a student's transcript and standardized test scores. Looking at the numbers another way, 70.3 percent of polled admissions officers give a student's character moderate or considerable importance, and the personal statement is where that character shows up most clearly.

The essay is not another simple assignment. For a lot of applicants with similar grades and test scores, it can be the deciding factor. Those stakes are exactly why what you do with AI matters so much.

What Universities Say About AI

Brown University has one of the more detailed policies out there. While they allow AI for spelling and grammar review "in the same way as any other platform that supports basic proofreading," they are clear that "the content of all essays, short-answer questions and any other material submitted by an applicant must be the work of that individual." Georgetown University holds a similar value, though their policy only becomes visible once you have started your application.

Cornell's FAQ states that ethical uses of AI include "researching colleges, brainstorming essay topics, and reviewing the grammar and spelling of your completed essays," while unethical uses include "using generative AI to outline, draft, or write your essays." Caltech is one of the few schools with a dedicated AI ethics page for applicants. They explicitly permit using AI to generate "questions or exercises to help kick start the brainstorming process." What they do not allow is asking AI to draft your essay, the same way a teacher could proofread your work but never write it for you.

Additional schools like UVA, Emory, Vanderbilt, Carnegie Mellon, and WashU follow similar limited-use frameworks: proofreading and brainstorming are allowed, generating content is not.

Then there is a large group with no official published policy: Princeton, MIT, Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, UPenn, UChicago, Columbia, Dartmouth, UCLA, UC Berkeley, Rice, Notre Dame, UMichigan, UNC, USC, UCSD, and NYU.

The University of California system is even more strict, warning that using a completely AI-generated answer "is equivalent to academic dishonesty. UC runs plagiarism checks on applications, and if your PIQs are found to have been generated by AI with unattributed sources, you could be disqualified from UC admission entirely."

You should look up the specific policies of the schools you are applying to. Generally speaking, using AI to help with research, brainstorming, and proofreading is allowed, but using AI to write any finished material is not.

So How Can AI Tools Like Esslo Actually Help?

Esslo was built to ethically help students with college application essays through instant, data-backed feedback. Founded by Stanford graduates Hadassah Betapudi and Elijah Kim, Esslo provides AI-powered feedback on college essays without writing any parts of the application for you. It gives line-by-line comments that target weak areas, evaluating writing style, story arc, detail, and character. It scores your essay based on previously admitted essays and lets you compare your results against 150,000+ essays reviewed on the platform. It covers everything ranging from Common App, Coalition App, and UC application essays, and even school-specific supplementals.

Because Esslo only provides feedback and never writes for you, Esslo complies with university policies. Esslo simply gives honest feedback that most students previously could only access from a college counselor. Rick Clark, executive director of enrollment management at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said about Esslo: "Using ChatGPT and copy and pasting it will create a horrible essay because it's not specific and detailed, but using [Esslo] to get feedback? In that regard, I'm all for it. It's democratizing resources, advice and consults, and it's available 24-7, where sometimes adults are sleeping or working a second job."

To prevent cost being a barrier, students who qualify for Common App, SAT, or ACT fee waivers get unlimited access to Esslo for free. Over 80,000 students and college counselors have used Esslo to get into every T20 school and many more. The platform has been covered by Inside Higher Ed, EdTech Digest, and eSchool News.

Your essay has more potential than you think. Esslo gives you the line-by-line feedback to unlock it, without writing a single word for you, keeping you fully within every school's AI policy. Get started for free at esslo.org. For more tips and examples, follow us on Instagram and TikTok. Hadassah and Elijah are also both always just an email away if you have any questions!

Good luck, and happy writing!