Why Trying to Guess “What Colleges Want” Ruins Your College Essay

Here’s a classic message students hear when they begin the college application process: to get into a particular college, you need to figure out what that college wants to hear — and then tailor your essay accordingly.

There’s a very simple reason this messaging exists. College consulting has become a multibillion-dollar industry, and consultants have discovered that the best sales technique is to claim they know “admissions secrets.” They recruit former admissions officers and tell families they can shape you into the ideal applicant for Harvard, Stanford, and other elite schools.

The assumption behind this thinking is that if you know what colleges want, you can reverse-engineer your essay and get admitted. But this way of thinking misunderstands the whole purpose of the college essay. Here are three reasons why trying to guess what colleges want backfires every time.

No One Actually Knows What Colleges Want in a College Essay


Let’s say you’re a high-achieving student and you hire a flashy college counselor who used to work as an admissions officer at Harvard, which happens to be your dream school. Perfect, you think. This person spent years working in the very office that will be assessing your file, and they’re telling you they know exactly what you should say in your essay to get in.

This all sounds very promising, but in practice it makes no sense. The counselor you hired may know what they liked to read back in the day — but they can’t possibly know what will impress the admissions officers reading your application in a few months from now.

The truth is that admissions officers are simply individuals with different backgrounds, experiences, and tastes. The counselor you hired may be particularly impressed with high-level scientific research, but the person reading your essay at Harvard may be more interested in the fact that you ran an international food club in high school.

In other words, there’s always an element of chance when you apply to college. What impresses one admissions officer may leave another unimpressed. So it’s possible that by following your college counselor’s advice about what this college wants to hear, you’ll end up disqualifying yourself.

Of course it would be wonderful if college counselors had magical powers so they could predict the preferences of a specific reader. But unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way.

Trying to Guess What Colleges Want Leads to Formulaic Essays

All of this is relatively harmless compared to the real danger of pushing students to think about “what colleges want.”

The college essay has become a critical part of the college application. Many students these days have excellent grades, standardized test scores, and extracurriculars, so the essay has become students’ best opportunity to distinguish themselves from other candidates. 

What happens when a counselor tells a student that they should adapt this part of the application to fit with what a particular college wants? The student cuts out whatever original content they had and replaces it with a generic response that aligns with a cliché about the school.

Here are a few of the clichés I’ve heard over the past few years: “Stanford wants self-directed entrepreneurial students”; “Harvard wants future leaders”; “Brown wants quirky, independent thinkers”; “Columbia wants intellectually curious students who love the Core.”

These clichés come from a mix of university branding, consultant storytelling, and parents trying to make sense of a chaotic process. But the reality is that admissions offices are large and heterogeneous, and classes are intentionally built with a wide variety of interests and personalities.

If you listen to anyone who tells you they know what colleges want, you’ll erase your own voice and write a formulaic essay that sounds like hundreds of others — and that’s the surest way to land on the rejections pile.

Admissions Officers Aren’t Looking for a Formula — They’re Looking for a Surprise

If, on the other hand, you look inward and reflect authentically on your past experiences, you’ll come up with the opposite of a cliché: an observation about yourself that only you could have thought of. And this is precisely the kind of thing that makes an application stand out from a sea of essays focusing on “what colleges want.”

Why? Because admissions officers read enormous stacks of essays, and when an applicant reads the Common App prompts and answers one honestly, they sit up and pay attention.

Here’s the thing most people don’t realize: admissions officers are actually rooting for you. When they read a promising opening sentence, they’re hoping it will take them on a journey they couldn’t have imagined. And every now and then it does, and they’re extremely excited to show the essay to their colleagues… but most of the time, they read an essay about what they supposedly “want,” and they just shake their heads and move on.

There’s only one way to write a successful college essay, and that’s by asking yourself the hard questions and refusing to be satisfied with easy answers. If you do this, you’ll come up with something that makes an admissions officer take notice.

If you focus on “what colleges want,” on the other hand, you’ll avoid doing this work and end up submitting an essay that looks like everything else that came in this year.

Students don’t need to guess what colleges want. They need to reflect honestly on their own experiences. Authentic insight makes an essay stand out more than any strategy.

This article is part of the College Essay Misconceptions Series, which examines the most common myths about college essay advice.

If you’re working on your own college essay and want one-on-one guidance, learn more about our college essay coaching.