The New Rules of the Game: What AI Has Actually Changed About Getting Into College

I’ve spent twenty-five years at The Learning Consultants reading applications, coaching essays, and sitting with families the night before a decision drops. In that time, I’ve seen the SAT go test-optional, I’ve watched the Common App reinvent itself more than once, and I’ve navigated Connecticut families through affirmative action rulings and admissions scandals. None of it moved as fast, or touched as many parts of the process at once, as what’s happened in the last eighteen months with AI.

Here’s what I tell every family who sits down with me at The Learning Consultants: the panic phase is over. We’ve moved past the “will ChatGPT write everyone’s essay” freakout of 2024. What’s replaced it is more interesting, more nuanced, and — if you understand it — genuinely to your student’s advantage. Let me walk you through what’s actually changed.

AI Is Now on Both Sides of the Desk

The biggest shift isn’t that students have access to AI. It’s that admissions offices do too, and they’re using it aggressively. Virginia Tech now runs an AI model alongside a human reader to score short-answer essays, which is helping them send decisions nearly a month earlier than in past cycles. Caltech is experimenting with AI-conducted voice interviews about research projects. Georgia Tech uses AI to scan transcripts and speed up administrative review. Admissions offices are drowning in volume — the Common App reported 9.4 million applications this cycle, a 5% jump from the year before — and AI is how they’re staying afloat.

At the same time, most institutions still don’t have a settled policy on what students are allowed to do. A recent survey of over 200 admissions officers found that roughly two-thirds of institutions have no official policy on generative AI in essays. That ambiguity isn’t going away this cycle. It means the safest posture for your student isn’t “figure out the loophole” — it’s “write like someone who has nothing to hide,” which, not coincidentally, is also the posture that produces the strongest essay.

The Real Danger Isn’t Getting Caught. It’s Sounding Like Everyone Else.

This is the point I make most emphatically to families at The Learning Consultants, because it’s the one most likely to be missed. AI can produce a clean, well-organized, mature-sounding essay in about four seconds. That means polish is no longer rare, which means polish is no longer valuable. What AI reliably produces — and what admissions readers are now trained to notice — is the same handful of emotionally safe words showing up again and again: resilience, passion, growth, leadership, community, impact. Those aren’t bad words. They’re just no longer distinguishing ones, because every AI-assisted essay reaches for them by default.

An admissions officer reading thousands of files a season develops a nose for this fast. The essays that stand out now aren’t the most polished ones — they’re the most specific ones. A precise memory. An odd detail nobody else would think to include. A sentence that sounds like it could only have been written by this one particular seventeen-year-old, not by a well-trained language model asked to sound like a seventeen-year-old. This is precisely why several schools have dropped numeric essay scores, added prompts asking students to reflect directly on their relationship with AI, or started requesting outlines and early drafts as evidence of an authentic writing process. Authenticity isn’t a soft value anymore. It’s become the actual evaluation criterion.

Fewer Essays, Not Less Scrutiny

You may have noticed a number of well-known schools — WashU, Tulane, UNC, the University of Washington among them — trimming the number of required essays and supplements this cycle. On the surface, that looks like relief. Dig one layer deeper and it’s something else: with fewer essays, each one now carries more diagnostic weight, and admissions offices are compensating by leaning harder on the parts of the file AI can’t easily fabricate — the consistency between a student’s transcript, activity list, and recommendation letters. AI tools are now used to scan recommendation letters for generic “boilerplate” phrasing that signals a lukewarm endorsement, and to check whether a student’s supplements sound school-specific or interchangeable across applications. The whole file is being read for coherence, not just for individual polish. That’s a genuinely different task than it was five years ago, and it’s exactly the kind of strategic, whole-file thinking I help families work through at The Learning Consultants.

So What Should a Student Actually Do?

I want to give you something more useful than “be authentic,” because that phrase gets thrown around so often it’s become almost meaningless. Here’s what it looks like in practice.

Use AI as a thinking partner, never as a ghostwriter. Brainstorming with an AI tool, using it to sanity-check structure, or asking it to point out where a paragraph goes flat — that’s how most writers, adult and teenage alike, work today, and it’s not something to hide. The line is crossed the moment the words on the page stopped being generated by your own thinking. Every family I work with at The Learning Consultants gets the same instruction: if it went through a chatbot at any stage, tell your counselor. That’s not a confession — it’s information that helps us make sure the final essay is unmistakably the student’s own voice.

Chase specificity, not sophistication. The instinct under pressure is to sound impressive. Resist it. An essay about the particular way your grandfather burned toast every Sunday will beat an essay about “resilience” nine times out of ten, because the first one could only have been written by one person on earth and the second could have been written by an algorithm in about six seconds.

Make the whole application tell one coherent story. Because admissions offices are now reading files for internal consistency, a mismatch between what your essay claims and what your activity list shows is more visible than it used to be, not less. This is where strategic guidance matters most — making sure the reach schools, the target schools, and the recommendation letters are all reinforcing the same honest picture of who your student actually is.

Don’t assume test-optional or AI-read means less rigorous. If anything, the bar for genuine differentiation has gone up, even as some of the traditional friction points — required essays, standardized tests — have loosened.

The Money Conversation Has Changed Too

One trend worth a family’s full attention: several highly selective schools have significantly expanded financial aid this cycle. Yale, for instance, now covers the full cost of attendance for families earning under $100,000, with steep reductions extending well into the $100,000–$200,000 range. That’s reshaping the calculus for middle-class families who might have written off certain reach schools purely on sticker price. Part of the work I do at The Learning Consultants now includes making sure families understand these shifts before they rule anything out — the “value versus cost” conversation looks different than it did even two admissions cycles ago.

What Hasn’t Changed, and Won’t

For all of this disruption, one thing remains stubbornly, reassuringly constant: no admissions office — and no AI tool a college deploys — has replaced the human reader making the final call. Holistic review still means a person is weighing your student’s file as a whole human being, not a set of data points to be optimized. That’s precisely why the essay hasn’t lost its importance, even as its format shrinks and its scrutiny intensifies. It’s actually become more important, because it’s the one part of the application a chatbot can imitate but never actually author.

That’s the work I love most about running The Learning Consultants. My job was never to make a student’s application sound like everyone else’s version of “impressive.” It’s to help a genuinely interesting seventeen-year-old figure out how to sound like themselves on paper, at the exact moment technology has made that harder to fake and more valuable than ever to actually do.

If your family is heading into this process and you want a clear-eyed guide through what’s actually changed — not the panicked version, not the sales-pitch version, but the real one — that’s exactly the conversation I want to have with you at The Learning Consultants.

I have built a masterpiece life by helping students find their own voice and walk confidently into theirs. Let’s help your student find hers — or his.

— Daryl Capuano, The Learning Consultants