UNC Drops Essays, Cornell Restructures, Duke Stops Scoring: What the 2027 Application Season's Essay Shifts Mean for You

June 2026 brought a wave of supplemental essay policy changes from several prominent U.S. universities, and the moves collectively signal something significant about where college admissions is heading. Three schools in particular made headlines: UNC Chapel Hill, Cornell, and Duke, each taking a different approach. Understanding what changed and why matters for any family beginning to think about the 2027 application cycle.

2027 Application Season's Essay Shifts: Three Schools, Three Different Choices

UNC Chapel Hill made the most dramatic move: it eliminated all supplemental essays entirely. The school's statement was blunt and practical, saying it removed two short-answer questions from its supplemental materials to simplify the process for applicants. But the context behind the decision is more complicated than the announcement suggests.

UNC had recently drawn controversy after reports emerged that the university had quietly introduced AI scoring tools to evaluate the writing quality of submitted essays, a revelation that generated significant backlash. Shortly afterward, the school eliminated the essays altogether. Whether the two events are directly connected or simply coincidental, the optics were hard to ignore. UNC also has a competitive interest in attracting applicants away from peer institutions: the University of Virginia had already eliminated supplemental essays for nearly all of its programs in the 2025-26 cycle, and public flagship universities are increasingly competing for the same pool of strong applicants.

Cornell announced the elimination of its general supplemental essay, keeping only the college-specific essays that vary by which school within Cornell a student is applying to. The effect is that applicants still need to write essays, but those essays are now entirely tied to their specific academic program rather than to Cornell as a whole.

Duke kept its essay structure but made a meaningful shift in how essays factor into decisions. Duke's format, a required essay plus one optional essay chosen from four prompts, remains in place for the 2027 cycle. The required prompt asks applicants about their impression of Duke as a university and community and how it aligns with their goals, values, and interests. The four optional prompts cover diverse perspectives, navigating disagreement, something recently exciting, and how the student has chosen to engage with AI tools. The key change is that Duke has explicitly removed essays from its quantitative scoring algorithm. Essays are now evaluated as an overall impression rather than as a scored data point.

A Broader Pattern: Who Is Doing Less and Who Is Doing More

UNC and Duke are not isolated cases. The list of schools eliminating or reducing supplemental essay requirements has grown substantially. Among national universities, UNC, UVA, Rutgers, Case Western, Ohio State (for merit scholarship purposes), Florida State, and Northeastern have all moved in this direction. Among liberal arts colleges, Williams, Hamilton, Grinnell, Middlebury, Colgate, and Colby have also dropped supplemental essay requirements, though some of these schools may still request essays through applicant portals after an initial review.

Tulane announced in May 2026 that it was eliminating its "Why Tulane?" essay. Washington University in St. Louis opened an Early Action application option for the first time for 2027 and simultaneously reduced its optional essay count.

The trend at this tier of schools is unmistakably toward reduction.

The opposite is happening at the most selective schools. Johns Hopkins replaced a traditional "why this school" prompt with a question about a first step in an experience that shaped the applicant, explicitly designed around something that requires personal experience and cannot be plausibly generated by AI. Caltech requires multiple essays covering STEM academic interests, STEM curiosity, a STEM-related experience, and creative thinking, along with short-answer questions. The pattern is clear: mid-tier public universities are cutting essays, while top private universities and Ivies are adding more targeted, harder-to-fake prompts.

What Is Driving These Changes?

AI is the central factor. A 2026 College Board survey of more than 3,000 university faculty found that 74% reported students using AI to write papers or complete assignments, 84% of high school students reported using AI for academic work, and 45% of faculty held negative views about AI in higher education. Short essays of 150 to 250 words are essentially impossible to assess with any AI detection tool reliably. When schools cannot trust that an essay represents a student's own writing, its diagnostic value in the admissions process drops toward zero. Duke's former dean of admissions stated publicly that the school no longer assumes essays accurately reflect students' actual writing ability, which is precisely why Duke shifted them out of its quantitative scoring model.

Application volume and review efficiency are also factors. When UVA eliminated its supplemental essays, its regular decision application volume jumped from 17,568 to 26,767, an increase of more than 52%. Reading essays takes significant time, and for public universities facing state-imposed limits on out-of-state enrollment, expanding the overall applicant pool while processing applications faster has become a rational operational choice.

What This Means for Students Applying in 2027

Fewer essays does not mean easier admissions. When UNC eliminated its supplemental essays, it lowered the barrier for every applicant who had previously skipped UNC because of the extra writing requirement. A larger applicant pool means a lower acceptance rate and tighter competition. The old logic of "I've written ten essays, I'm prepared" no longer maps cleanly onto the new landscape.

For schools that still require substantial writing, particularly Cornell's college-specific essays, JHU, and Caltech, the advice is to start early. College-specific essays require meaningful research into a particular school's programs and culture, and that research takes time. Starting in November for a Cornell Engineering essay is not enough time to do it well.

The Common App main essay now carries more weight. As supplemental essays disappear at more schools, the personal statement becomes the primary space where an applicant can tell a full story and reveal something genuine about who they are. A coalition of more than 200 colleges has issued guidance calling for less emphasis on activity lists and more weight on personal voice, values, and intellectual substance in the personal statement. This shift makes the main essay more consequential, not less.

A few principles that hold regardless of how the policy landscape shifts: authenticity consistently lands better than polish, essays that feel AI-generated or overly smooth are increasingly recognizable to experienced readers, and going deep on one meaningful experience almost always produces stronger writing than covering several experiences at a shallow level.

Demonstrated interest is shifting from paper to behavior. When "Why School?" essays disappear, admissions offices lose a traditional signal of genuine interest. They are replacing it with behavioral signals instead: attending virtual information sessions and registering through official portals, connecting with current students or alumni for informational conversations, and most powerfully, applying Early Decision, which signals commitment to a school more convincingly than any essay can.

The AI boundary in essays is now explicitly defined. Starting in 2026, the Common App added an AI disclosure option on the submission page, asking applicants to indicate whether they used AI tools in writing their essays. The explicit prohibition is on submitting content that was substantively generated by AI, and Cornell specifically has called out AI drafting, AI authorship, and AI translation as violations of its academic integrity standards. Using AI for brainstorming, grammar checking, and light editing remains in a permissible gray zone. Submitting AI-generated paragraphs as your own writing does not.

The Bigger Picture

The 2027 application season's essay shifts in essay requirements is a surface-level symptom of a deeper question that admissions offices are actively grappling with: how do you identify authentic individuals in an era when AI can produce convincing text at scale? Schools that believe short essays cannot answer that question reliably are eliminating them. Schools that believe more specific, experience-grounded prompts can still do the work are doubling down on harder questions.

What this means for applicants is that the task has not gotten easier. It has gotten more concentrated. With fewer places to show who you are, each one matters more. Common App opens August 1. The work of figuring out what you actually want to say, and why, is worth starting now.

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