August Whiplash

Class of 2026, get OFF the dance floor. People are applying to the school you have not unpacked at.

Applications for next year opened August 1. My sons have not moved into their dorms yet, and plenty of seniors have not even started senior year.

Class of 2027, it is your turn, and the parents doing this for the first time are the ones feeling the whiplash.

I keep hearing from senior parents: Something happened, I do not understand it, what am I supposed to do right now?! Help!

A Few Updates About Essays

The biggest change of this cycle is that the supplemental essay is disappearing bit by bit from many institutions including:

• UNC-Chapel Hill removed both of its short answer questions.

• Tulane paused its Why Tulane essay.

• Miami eliminated its supplement entirely.

• Yale dropped its Why Yale question and cut its short takes to three.

• Cornell removed the university wide essay and kept only the school specific ones.

• Washington University in St. Louis removed its optional writing supplement.

• Wake Forest cut down to one prompt but added a recommendation letter.

• UVA did this a year earlier.

Closer to (my) home, UGA dropped its well known book essay, and Georgia Tech announced on July 29, four days before applications opened, that it was ending its short answer requirement. Tech’s admissions team said the essay had stopped being a differentiating factor and that removing it was meant to make the process less complex, not less rigorous. Nearly 68,000 students applied to Tech last year, a record.

If your student spent part of the summer writing one of these, know that it is not necessarily wasted work. Some schools on your list will still want essays, and the practice of writing one carries over to everything else they have to write this fall.

This is interesting: When UVA dropped its supplemental essays, its regular decision applications went from 17,568 to 26,767, which is a 52.4% increase in a single year. Nothing about UVA got easier, but the front door got wider, more people walked through it, and the admit rate moved accordingly. Expect some version of that at every school on that list.

So what does this mean for your senior? With fewer places to write, the Common App personal statement is now carrying almost all of the weight.

But but but! Honors colleges and scholarship programs are largely keeping their essays even where the university dropped them.

• At UNC, Morehead-Cain and Robertson run separate applications with their own writing, and Honors Carolina may still ask for an additional response.

• Tulane’s honors and scholars tracks can still require program specific statements.

• TCU kept the prompts for its honors college and its nursing program.

*Note that several of these schools have not updated every page of their own websites yet, so you can find two contradictory answers on a single school’s site this week, which is why you should trust the application itself over the FAQ.

What Actually Has To Happen This Month

Here it is, in order of how badly it hurts to miss it.

• Register for a test if your student still needs one. Registration for the August 22 SAT closes this Friday, August 7. The September 12 SAT closes August 28. The September 19 ACT closes August 14.

  • SAT: August 22, September 12, October 3, November 7, December 5, then March 6, May 1, and June 5

  • ACT: September 19, October 17, December 12, then February 27, April 10, June 12, and July 10

  • Most early deadlines land on November 1, which makes the October sitting the last one that realistically counts for that wave of applying

• Ask for teacher recommendation letters now. They are about to get inundated. God bless the teachers.

• Start the personal statement. The Common App prompts did not change this year. All seven are the same, and the most chosen option last cycle was Topic of Your Choice.

• Sort out Early Decision versus Early Action before anyone gets attached to a school. Early Decision is the only binding one, and it means committing before you can compare aid offers, while Early Action just means applying early and hearing early. Some schools have no binding option at all.

• Set up a separate email address for colleges. The volume is high, and also kids don’t check email well, in general.

The other thing that changed this year is testing. Auburn has stopped hedging about it, because every applicant for fall 2027 now has to submit a score regardless of GPA. Alabama requires one from students below a 3.0, LSU is reinstating, and the Georgia and Florida systems already had. If your list leans Southern public, your student is going to need submit GPA.

What I want to say to the parents calling me is that the whiplash is real.

Last August I was you.

Take a breath, one thing at a time, lean on each other and just remember:

They are going to be OK, and so are you.