By Sunny Grewal, Founder of StrivePath

If you're the parent of a rising senior, you've probably noticed something new about your student’s application this summer. A lot of the "extra" essays they were supposed to be writing? Gone.



Not from every school. But from more schools than at any point I can remember in fifteen years of doing this work. And the list keeps growing.

Here's what's actually happening, why it's happening, and (more importantly) what it means for how your student should approach applications this fall.

What actually changed

For the 2026-27 application cycle, the following selective colleges have officially eliminated or reduced their supplemental essay requirements:

• Tulane University retired its "Why Tulane?" essay.
• University of Georgia eliminated its "book you read" essay.
• UNC Chapel Hill removed both of its short-answer prompts. Applicants now submit only the Common App personal statement plus their activities list.
• University of Miami dropped its supplemental essay outright.
• Cornell eliminated its university-wide essay, though school-specific essays for each Cornell college still exist.
• Yale retired its "Why Yale?" short answer.
• Washington University in St. Louis cut an optional essay but kept a 250-word academic interest essay.
• Georgia Tech removed its short-answer question.

These join UVA, TCU, Northeastern, Auburn, and Colby, which had already dropped supplemental essays in the prior cycle.

Duke took a different path. It kept its supplemental essays but stopped scoring them numerically, which reduces their weight without eliminating them.

If your student's college list still reflects last year's requirements, it's out of date. Be sure they verify each school directly on its admissions site before wasting time drafting something that is no longer needed.

The full list, as of August 2026

Here's the working list of colleges that have removed or reduced supplemental essay requirements for the 2026-27 cycle. Some dropped their supplements this summer. Others eliminated them in prior cycles and continue not to require them. This landscape shifted through June and July, and a few announcements are still landing, so verify on each school's site.

Dropped or reduced supplements for 2026-27 (announced this year):

• Yale (retired "Why Yale?" and reduced short answers)
• Cornell (dropped university-wide essay; school-specific essays remain)
• UNC Chapel Hill (removed both short-answer prompts)
• Georgia Tech (removed short-answer question)
• Washington University in St. Louis (cut optional essay; "Why Major" 250-word essay remains)
• University of Georgia (eliminated the "book" essay)
• Tulane (retired "Why Tulane?")
• University of Miami (dropped supplement)
• University of Vermont (dropped supplement)

Already had no required supplement (from prior cycles):

• University of Virginia (dropped last cycle; nursing still requires one)
• Texas Christian University (TCU)
• Northeastern University
• Auburn University
• Colby College
• Rutgers University
• Case Western Reserve University
• Clemson University
• DePaul University
• Drexel University
• Ohio State University (scholarships and honors programs still require essays)
• Penn State University Park
• Florida State University
• Michigan State University
• University of Connecticut (special programs still require essays)
• Purdue University
• University of Pittsburgh (scholarships and honors still require essays)
• University of Delaware
• University of Denver
• University of Alabama

Liberal arts colleges with no required supplement:

• Williams (optional academic writing sample)
• Middlebury
• Colgate (optional prompt)
• Grinnell (optional prompt)
• Hamilton
• Bates
• Kenyon
• Oberlin
• Skidmore
• Sewanee
• Connecticut College
• Gettysburg

Kept supplements but changed how they’re weighted:

• Duke (still requires supplemental essays but no longer scores them numerically)

A few things are worth flagging on this list. "No required supplement" is not the same as "no writing at all." Many of these schools still ask for optional short answers, academic-interest paragraphs, or portfolio pieces for specific programs. Ohio State and Pittsburgh, for example, require essays for scholarships and honors programs even though their standard application does not. Cornell dropped one essay but still requires a school-specific one for whichever college a student applies to (Arts & Sciences wants 650 words on academic curiosity; Engineering wants a combination of two 200-word and four 100-word essays). Read the fine print.

And if a list includes Rice, Georgetown, Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, MIT, all eight Ivies except Cornell's university-wide essay, USC, Vanderbilt, or almost any of the elite LACs (Amherst, Bowdoin, Pomona, Swarthmore, Wesleyan), they still have their full supplemental essay set. This is not a universal shift. It's a specific cluster of selective publics and a handful of privates.

Why colleges are doing this

The stated reasons vary, but they cluster around three ideas.

Reason one: the essays weren't doing much work anymore. UGA's Director of Undergraduate Admissions said the personal essay gives them what they need. Georgia Tech's Executive Director said the supplemental essay "was no longer a differentiating factor" in their decisions. Miami said it remains "confident" it can enroll strong students without the extra essay. When admissions officers read tens of thousands of applications in a short window, essays that don't reliably help them separate students become noise rather than a useful signal.

Reason two: the AI problem. No school has said this in a press release, but it comes up in every conversation I have with admissions people. When roughly two-thirds of colleges are now using some form of AI detection, and the top private detector companies have false-positive rates around 4%, the "Why Us?" essay has become a lower-value, higher-noise part of the process. UGA, Cornell, and WashU all admitted (in various forms) that the supplemental essay isn't adding enough to justify the reading time in an era when a meaningful share of what shows up is either AI-generated or ghost-written to sound like a college marketing brochure.

Reason three: application volume is exploding. Common App received 9.4 million applications by March 1, 2026, up 5% year over year. The average applicant now sends 6.59 applications, up from 6.41 the prior year. Early Action volume was up 7%. When every admissions reader has more files and less time, colleges are asking themselves what actually earns its keep in the process. The 250-word "Why Us?" often loses that argument.

Here's the counterintuitive part

Fewer required essays sounds like a win for stressed-out seniors. It isn't.

When a school like UNC removes its supplemental essays, three things happen simultaneously.

First, the personal statement matters more. At schools with no supplement, the Common App essay is the only piece of writing an admissions officer will read. There's no backup. If your student’s personal statement is generic, they've lost their one shot.

Second, the activities list becomes a bigger differentiator. With fewer essays to distinguish applicants, admissions readers spend more time on the ten activity slots and the short 150-character descriptions. A vague description ("Volunteered at local hospital, gained valuable experience") reads even flatter when it's the applicant’s only chance to communicate what they've done.

Third, application volume will rise at these schools. UNC's stated reason for removing the supplements was to "reduce a barrier to applying." That means more applicants. More applicants at the same admit-rate schools means lower admit rates. UVA is the closest thing we have to prove this point: after removing its supplemental essay for the 2025-26 cycle, UVA received 82,118 undergraduate applications, up roughly 27% year over year. That's a record high, and it happened in a single cycle.

If your student was counting on a great "Why Us?" essay to make up ground on grades or scores, that lever is gone at more schools than ever.

What this means for your student, practically

Some things to do this month, before school starts.

Verify every school on the list. The landscape shifted in June and July of 2026. Anything you or your counselor wrote down last spring may be wrong. Check each school's own admissions website (not a third-party summary) for its 2026-27 requirements. Georgia Tech's change happened on July 29, others happened around August 1.

Spend real time on the personal statement. If your student drafted a Common App essay this summer, great. Now revise it. The Common App prompts didn't change this year, which means anything drafted before June still applies. But at schools with no supplement, this essay is doing all the work. It has to be specific, it has to sound like a real seventeen-year-old, and it has to say something only your kid could say. Generic essays didn't survive this cycle even before the supplement cuts.

Rewrite the activities list. Ten slots, 150 characters each for the description, 50 for the title. Most families under-invest here because it looks like a form. It isn't. It's a compressed narrative of what your kid did with high school. Spend three or four hours on these descriptions the way you would on an essay. Use action verbs, quantify where you can (hours per week, students taught, dollars raised, teams built), and cut anything that sounds like a generic resume.

Ask for recommendations now, not in September. Teachers get flooded in the first two weeks of school. The ones who agree in August have time to write strong letters. The ones who agree in mid-September are potentially already writing forty of them.

Don't rush the UC application. The UC application opened August 1, and its submission window is October 1 through December 1. Do not submit in August just because you can. UC Personal Insight Questions (four out of eight prompts, 350 words each) reward iteration more than almost any other essay in the process. Students who submit in early November regularly outperform students who rush in mid-August.

Take AI seriously as a risk, not a shortcut. Roughly two-thirds of colleges are using some form of AI detection. The Common App treats AI-generated essay content as application fraud, regardless of whether it gets flagged. Even schools that have publicly stopped using detectors (Johns Hopkins, UCLA) are comparing essay voice against graded writing samples, short answers, and interviews. If your student’s essay doesn't sound like their emails and text messages, something's off. A polished-but-lifeless essay is more damaging than an imperfect one that sounds like a real person.

One more thing worth saying

The families we work with who will do best in this cycle aren't the ones with the most polished applications. They're the ones who understand that as more schools drop supplements, the parts that remain (the personal statement, the activities list, the recommendations, the transcript) have to do more work. Not less.

If an application feels lighter this year, it doesn't mean it's easier. It means every remaining piece is more significant.

Plan accordingly.

Sunny Grewal is the Founder of StrivePath, a college admissions advising firm serving families across the Bay Area and Orange County.

Sources

• Inside Higher Ed — "Some Colleges Drop Supplemental Essays for 2026-27" (July 8, 2026)
• Daily Tar Heel — UNC removes supplemental essays (July 8, 2026)
• Georgia Tech Admission — Application simplification (July 29, 2026)
• Higher Ed Insights — "Colleges are cutting the 'Why Us' essay" (July 17, 2026)
• Common Application — 2025-26 volume data (March 2026 report)
• Common App 2026-2027 Essay Prompts