A College Essay Veteran on How the Essay Has Changed

Screenwriting and college essay coaching aren’t all that different, according to Ethan Sawyer.

Sawyer, who has spent more than two decades helping students get into college, mostly under the pseudonym College Essay Guy, holds two theater degrees and dreamed of writing movies but fell into coaching admissions essays as his first job out of college. Quickly, he noticed an unlikely connection between the two fields.

“[I was] taking what I was learning from screenwriting, those storytelling principles, and incorporating them into my work with students,” he said. “I always knew that I loved having deep conversations with people, and I knew that I liked helping people solve problems. But suddenly, I realized, ‘Oh, this actually is something that brings together a lot of my interests and skills.’”

Sawyer started his own company in 2012, and, in recent years, has also begun filling a niche in the admissions world: He tracks supplemental essays, including which institutions require them and what types of prompts are most common. He believes that he might be the single person in the nation who is most tapped in to these prompts. That attention has made him an asset not only to his clients but also to other college counselors, to whom he offers pay-what-you-can webinars on all things essays.

This admission season marks his fifth tracking those prompts and his 14th as the College Essay Guy. He spoke to Inside Higher Ed about what has changed about college essays over the course of his career, what this year’s essay landscape looks like and more. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: Over the 14 years you’ve been doing this, what are the biggest changes you’ve noticed, both in what colleges are asking for and also in how students feel about the process?

A: I honestly think a lot of it is similar to how it’s been from years past. I think there’s a lot of focus and talk about how things are quote-unquote always changing, but when I think about what this process is at a fundamental level, it’s students digging deep to figure out what are the parts of myself that I can show to colleges alongside the hard work that I put in to get good grades, to challenge myself. But I think the process, to me, is more similar to what it was 15 years ago than different.

I think a big thing happened around when a lot of institutions went to test optional and test blind. Everybody sort of shifted and went, “OK, what really matters now?” I think there was an increased interest in the college essay, the written parts of the application, because students were like, “Well, that’s how I’m going to differentiate myself.” My sense of it is that sort of stayed, even though some selective schools have [reinstated testing requirements]. Colleges are still really interested in that, and I’ve been really checking, asking admission officers, “Do you sense that essays are going away?” And nobody that I’ve ever talked to on the admission side has said, “Yeah, I can see where that’s potentially happening.”

Q: One thing that I hear from other people in the admissions counseling world is about anxiety: the feeling that student anxiety and pressure on themselves has increased. Is that something you sense, and how have you dealt with that?

A: I think after COVID—and I saw this with my own daughter, who did her first day of school online in kindergarten—I think kids were staying inside more, obviously, and my even my own daughter didn’t want to go out as much. She was like, “I kind of want to stay home, because it’s cozy here and it’s safe.”

What I saw is more students were writing about anxiety, and when I talk to admission officers and I ask them, “What are the most common topics that you see?” it’s anxiety. It has sort of replaced the essay that used to be the big cliché, [which] is students doing the mission trip, going somewhere else, working with people who have relatively less money, less privilege, and then making an impact on their lives. That’s become more cringe, to use their term, but what’s replaced it is this focus on and thinking about mental health and anxiety.

I think that for many students—this is just, like, me getting into College Essay Guy–mode for a second—they feel like they should write about that in their personal statement. I think that there’s opportunities for them to put that in the “challenges and circumstances” section, I think there are opportunities for them to have their counselor write about that, and then also students should just know that they don’t have to put that in their personal statement. That could just be a journey that they went through, and that may not be the best way to show their skills, qualities and values. But oftentimes for students, that challenge looms so large because it’s the biggest thing that they’ve been dealing with.

Q: Regarding AI, I’m curious about what you see on your end. When students first come to you, are they asking you whether they can use AI? Have they already had AI help them?

A: This is fresh for me, because I had two instances in the last 24 hours about this. The thing that I’m doing, the thing I’m encouraging counselors to do, is just to ask and have an open conversation about it and not to load it too much with the moral rightness or wrongness of it. I think there’s that tendency in some circles to be like, “You’re bad if you do it, and you’re taking the moral high ground if you don’t.” I think there’s another move here where we can just sort of go, “Hey, this is a tool. Let’s let it into the room and talk about it.” One of my colleagues asks students at the start of the process, “How do you plan to use AI in your in your application process?” It opens up a dialogue. So, I just want to really encourage counselors to normalize it as much as we can.

I talked to 20 college admission reps [about this], and they were like, “Don’t. Really, just don’t,” really taking a hard-line stance. For now, we take the position of, we don’t encourage you to use it for writing. We do think it can be really useful for researching. Make sure that you ask it for links. But the Common App says it really needs to be your own work, so make sure that it is. And then the other piece that I think is important is I really want students to feel like, if an admission officer asks them, “How did you use AI in your process?” I really want them to feel proud of their answer.

Q: I wanted to talk about your Matchlighters program, where counselors work pro bono with low-income, high-achieving students. How did that come to be and what has that experience been like?

A: I was working in, like, test prep before I became College Essay Guy, and I met a guy who ran a charter school in Los Angeles, and he was like, “Hey, would you ever be willing to come and teach test prep for my students?” So I sort of started volunteering there with my best friend, and then I was like, “Can we do essay stuff, too?” So, we created this program where we would do test prep in the winter into the spring, and then we would do college essays in the fall, a sort of boot camp–style thing, and we did that for a few years, and we expanded that to five different charter schools in the L.A. area.

So, when I started CEG, students were reaching out, like, “Hey, can I get some support?” And I would do some stuff for free. I would encourage them to join my courses, and, from day one, all of the courses were pay-what-you-can. In 2015, a student emailed me and was like, “Hey, I’m a high-achieving, low-income student. I just need someone to light a little match.” So I just put on a spreadsheet 20 or so students that I’d heard from, and then I reached out to my counselor email list and was like, “Hey, does anybody want to volunteer with students?” I think it was like 25 or something raised their hand, and I just matched them up on a spreadsheet. That just grew over the years, and in this past year, we matched almost 800 students and counselors on a one-to-one basis.

We’ve just had incredible experiences and results. We’ve had years where like 10 students got into Harvard, or 12 students got into Yale.

Q: Are there any particular lessons from doing the Matchlighters program that have particularly informed how you think about your work over all?

A: Students who come from low-income backgrounds have often faced a lot of challenges in their lives, and I think that when students read essays that are impactful, they sort of see a big challenge, and they’re like, “OK, I need to talk about my challenge.” What I’ve seen over the years is that there are a lot of ways to do that that don’t necessarily involve focusing on the challenge, but incorporating it. I guess my hope for students who have faced challenges in life is that they do some brainstorming around, “What are the other parts of myself that I want to bring, so that I’m not defined by this—that it’s part of me, but it’s not all of who I am?”

I’ve seen over the years there’s more range and possibilities and variety of what’s possible there in terms of telling a story. It’s not like you just write about the challenge or you don’t write about the challenge; there are ways of weaving it in, and that’s become more and more clear to me over the years.

This work of access is not that hard. When an independent educational consultant is thinking about, “Who do I work with?” obviously there is a tendency to want to work with people who can pay for it, because that’s what keeps the lights on. But I want to say, adding an element of pro bono work that is commensurate with the work that you’re doing for paying clients is just a matter of some planning. That’s one of the things that I’ve realized over the years. The message I want to give is, like, it’s easier than you think to do something like this. If folks are interested in learning more about how to do that, we as an organization would be really willing to talk to folks about doing that, and we’ve got resources on how to do that.

Q: Tracking supplemental essay prompts has become a big part of what you do in the past five years. What’s new this year in supplemental essays and what have you learned over the past several years?

A: There are [not many] schools asking about using AI in the process. Villanova added one, but out of the 300 prompts, that’s it. There aren’t actually more schools, which was surprising, because I would have expected more schools to be asking about that, but that didn’t change. That’s in a category of things that I expected to change more that didn’t. Another one is I’ve expected over the years—like five to 10 years—more schools to be adding video components. But they haven’t. When I ask admission officers about why, they say a couple things. One is, you can’t skim an interview. Like, “We’re reading really fast, we don’t have time to really take in a video.” So, it’s a scaling thing. And then I think people are still thinking a little bit about access

The “why major” [prompt]—that one’s stayed pretty similar over the years and is usually [used by] colleges that admit by major or that somehow helps them decide where to slot students in. I’m surprised there aren’t more colleges that have short-answer questions, because I think that that is a fun way to get into students’ personality really quickly. The “navigating adversity” one really started to become more popular after [widespread campus protests in 2023 and 2024]. The theme seems to be around bridge-building; NYU specifically calls out bridge-building. And I just think that that’s just such a beautiful essence for what college is all about anyway, so it is pointing to core values more than just, they’re afraid and they want to attract the students who are not going to riot.