Each fall, high school seniors are told the college essay is their one chance to take control of their application. And in many ways, that’s true. It’s the only place they can speak for themselves, and place their GPA, test scores, and extracurriculars into a broader context.
But in the age of generative AI, it’s tempting to ignore that invitation to speak in your own voice. More students are turning to tools like ChatGPT to generate their first drafts. Some parents call it smart strategy. Others quietly wonder: is this ethical? Will colleges know? And more importantly, will my kid learn anything from this process?
To explore what’s really at stake, I spoke with Aaron Colton, an Associate Teaching Professor and Director of First-Year Writing at Emory University and author of the forthcoming book Writing Through Writer’s Block. Colton has taught writing at Duke, Georgia Tech, and Emory, and his research focuses on how students and authors write under pressure.
The Problem Doesn’t Start with AI
Colton is quick to note that the challenges students face in college writing classrooms didn’t begin with ChatGPT.
“The gaps in students’ writing that faculty are observing today have much less to do with commas and correctness than they do with the kind of focused, original thinking that begins in a healthy reading practice,” he said. And without that practice, “Students lose the opportunity to see what it looks like to take a position and work through its details.”
High school English curricula have shifted toward skimming short passages for main ideas. Writing assignments often favor speed over depth. So, when first-year college students are asked to develop their own argument or interpret complex material, they struggle—not because they’re unmotivated, but because they haven’t been asked to think this way before.
“There’s no way to improve as a writer without also improving as a reader,” Colton noted. “So writing instructors are now having to think much more specifically about how they teach students to read as they introduce them to college-level writing.”
Don’t Skip the Hard Part
Even the most driven students struggle when writing feels unfamiliar. And that’s where AI tools come in.
“Success in college writing depends on developing original ideas and establishing those ideas through evidence or interpretation,” Colton explained. “But when students are used to proving they’ve understood the gist of short texts, an assignment that asks them to think for themselves can feel scary.”
That discomfort is actually essential. “There’s a famous quotation from Joan Didion that I love,” Colton said. “‘I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.’”
In other words, writing doesn’t just express your ideas, it helps you discover them. And outsourcing that discovery to AI removes one of the most valuable parts of the process.
“Working through a hard draft—banging your head against a wall, sitting with writer’s block, scrapping a draft and starting over—is essential to becoming a thinking person,” Colton argued.
What Professors Actually Want From Student Writing
So, what does strong college writing look like?
Colton, who has spent his career teaching students across the humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields, put it simply: “Ten out of ten times I’d rather read an original but messy paper than a grammatically perfect paper that says nothing new or interesting.”
That emphasis on originality over polish may come as a surprise to students trained to maximize correctness and minimize risk. But the real work of college writing involves entering ongoing conversations—engaging with ideas, challenging assumptions, and taking intellectual risks.
“Students today are as bright and motivated as they’ve ever been,” Colton said. “But they’re also, for an enormous number of reasons, pressured to see college as just a means to a job. Their curiosity suffers.”
The Real Risk of Relying on AI
So what role, if any, should AI play in the early stages of student writing?
“In my opinion, there is no role for AI to play in the early stages,” Colton said. “Because writing is what brings you to your own thoughts, the process is necessarily human.”
He acknowledges that students may be tempted to use ChatGPT as a brainstorming tool, but warns that it often leads them toward clichés. “AI models are designed to reproduce something that at best resembles past instances of human expression,” he said. “They aren’t capable of generating new ideas themselves, and it’s unlikely they’ll lead students to new ideas.”
In fact, recent research from Microsoft suggests that using generative AI may diminish users’ critical thinking.
That doesn’t mean AI has no place in the writing classroom. “AI literacy—studying what AI is and what it can and cannot do—can play a role in writing classes,” Colton said. But he emphasizes that students need to develop their own ideas first, and evaluate where AI fits in afterward.
In the college application process, the same rules apply.
The Essay as Practice for a Life of Ideas
In the end, the personal statement can be more than a ticket to college. Done right, it’s a student’s first chance to write for an audience that doesn’t know them, and to engage in a process of rigorous revision.
“If you want to write a personal statement that helps you grow,” Colton said, “think about anything but college admissions as you write. Use that time to scrap, rewrite, and revise your way to new ideas. Discover what you didn’t realize you’d thought about yourself or something in the world.”
For students—and parents—worried about getting in, it’s easy to see writing as a hurdle. But Colton’s advice reframes it as an opportunity.
His message to students is clear: “Writing is one of the best ways to foster a sense of curiosity. Every student deserves an education where they can take themselves seriously as a writer.”
That kind of growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It happens when students are challenged, encouraged, and pushed to revise with purpose. The point isn’t to write the perfect essay. It’s to write the kind of essay only you could write.