College Application Essay Topics to Avoid – 2025-26 Edition
November 7, 2025
We would never unequivocally tell an applicant that any proposed college essay topic is off-limits. Great writers can take the most mundane, banal, and generic topic and transform it into a captivating composition. However, in our experience reading thousands of college essays, we are able to say with confidence that students are wise to steer clear of the following topics. Ahead is our 2025-26 edition of College Application Essay Topics to Avoid, but first…
Why should I avoid these college essay topics?
To avoid falling victim to two all-too-common pitfalls: undersharing and oversharing.
Let’s start with undersharing. Certain college essay topics inspire clich茅s. We can’t tell you why, exactly, but they just do. There are ways around those clich茅s, of course (outlined below), but in our experience, they are difficult to avoid. Since clich茅d takeaways will prevent you from crafting the most thoughtful possible reflection鈥攁nd thus prevent readers from connecting with you as an applicant鈥攚e would suggest avoiding them at all costs.
On the flip side of clich茅d, impersonal essay topics are topics that are way TMI, either emotionally or in regard to their subject matter. These topics can paint you in an unflattering light or simply be very distracting. As a result, they’ll ultimately shed precious little insight into what type of classroom and community member you would be. Remember, your main objective is to convince readers that you are ready and prepared to join a college community, both academically and socially.
Without further ado…
College Application Essay Topics to Avoid
1. Drugs, sex, and, well, just those two鈥�
While you鈥檙e not auditioning to become an altar boy/girl, there are certain risqu茅 topics that are unlikely to be viewed in a positive light by an admissions committee. On occasion, we鈥檝e seen students aim for shock value by incorporating stories of sexual encounters or drug use into their essays鈥�99% of the time, this is an awful idea.
There are, of course, tactful ways to address these subjects if they are central to revealing who you are. One could easily talk about their sexual identity without writing an abridged version of Fifty Shades of Grey. Likewise, if a story of addiction and recovery is an essential part of your past, it may be a worthy topic. However, students should never mention the casual use of drugs or alcohol. The same goes for any illegal acts. It sounds obvious enough, but you鈥檇 be surprised!
2. Travel Experiences
This is a common go-to topic for many students. If done well, recounting a trip to a foreign country will reveal something deeply personal and meaningful about you. Unfortunately, the travel essay is rarely executed well.
Too often, students, even fantastic young writers, waste precious application real estate on fanciful descriptions of Peruvian landscapes or generic observations about impoverished denizens of a Central American village. If you write about a trip to Haiti and chronicle the culture of the Haitian people, then the essay is not really about you 鈥� it might as well be a homework assignment for a World Cultures elective.
An admissions officer is not going to emerge from reading an essay like this thinking, 鈥淲hat a worldly chap!鈥� In reality, they are likely to feel like they just read a page from of Seinfeld fame.
Remember to talk about something that happened to you, where you are at the heart of the action. Colleges want to know who you are and how you view the world 鈥� the essay may be your only chance to provide them with this type of insight and the travelogue is rarely an effective vehicle.
3. Anything Too Grandiose
Many applicants are naturally inclined toward over-dramatization, hyperbole, and enhanced self-importance in their essays, falsely believing that they need to have wrestled a puma, grown up in a cult, or discovered a new galaxy at age seven in order to impress admissions officers. This couldn’t be further from the truth. While a聽great college essay can take place on a grand stage, it’s almost always more effective when it takes place in everyday life.
Likewise, how you discuss any given topic matters, too. For example, if you want to write about how you implemented a change in school lunch menu policy, that’s perfectly acceptable. However, if you spend most of the essay comparing said policy to The New Deal, that is not. Want to share more about your photographic expose in the school newspaper that highlighted the poor conditions of the football team’s locker room? Awesome. Planning to liken yourself to Jacob Riis? Please, no….
If you catch yourself doing any of the following, put your keyboard down…
- Playing Synonym Roulette. This is when students take a clear, well-written sentence and muddy it up with “elevated” diction. For example, turning “After working on my campaign for weeks, I was disappointed in the outcome of the election” into “After toiling into the pre-dawn hours for nearly a month, I was chagrined to hear that my election bid had, unfortunately, come to an untimely conclusion.“
- Using ChatGPT. AI-generated or revised essays tend to contain lots of broad, generic, or lofty insights. You might think that this type of language sounds more impressive, but in reality, it sounds hollow and removed. (Remember, ChatGPT is recycling the same language for every other college applicant, too.)
- Letting a parent or other adult rewrite any parts of your essay. Parents can help you in the brainstorming and editing stages by providing an adult sensibility and a mature, grounded perspective. However, many over-involved parents believe that they are helping their child鈥檚 essay by rewriting it in the style and tone of The New York Times. This is a mistake. Admissions officers do not want to read Nicholas Kristof鈥檚 version of your high school experience; they want it in your real teenage voice.
4. Sports Glory/Injuries
(In a John Facenda voice)鈥︹�漁n a crisp and dreary autumn day, a JV football field was the setting of a clash of titans, middleweight monsters of the gridiron. And there I stood, ready to perform the most challenging of the athletic arts, that fickle mistress known as鈥unting.鈥�
Ask any admissions officer how many compelling sports-themed essays they鈥檝e read in their entire careers. The answer will likely be somewhere between zero and one. Not even the spawn of Grantland Rice him/herself could breathe life into this black hole of a topic.
The caveat here is that an essay can, of course, involve athletics. However, sports should serve as the backdrop to something more deep and personal. Competition and training undoubtedly provide ample opportunity to show more about your character, ability, sportsmanship, reaction to adversity, and ability to contribute to a larger cause. Just make sure something more revealing is being communicated than the fact that you once netted a hat trick against a rival or drained a last-second, fadeaway three-pointer. If you鈥檙e that great at a given sport, chances are a coach has already recruited you.
5. The Stream of Consciousness Essay
Okay, so this isn鈥檛 exactly a topic, per se, but more of an ill-fated genre that we鈥檝e seen attempted before. Applicants will throw formality to the wind and spew out a string of stream-of-consciousness thoughts. If it worked for James Joyce, why not me? Unfortunately, such works typically read like a crazy e-mail written by a jilted lover at 3:00 am rather than A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Along those lines, avoid anything too attention-grabbing or “unique” in terms of structure unless you are a very, very confident and skilled writer. Your primary goal here is information, not style. Writing about yourself in the third person, turning your essay into a poem, opting for highly fragmented paragraphs, imagining yourself in some type of dream sequence, or being overly meta usually feels gimmicky rather than inspired, and takes attention away from you.
Final Thoughts 鈥� College Essay Topics to Avoid
Writing in an authentic voice does not mean scribbling down some stream-of-consciousness thoughts 24 hours before the application deadline. There is a popular myth that Abraham Lincoln penned the Gettysburg Address on a napkin en route to the battlefield. In truth, he spent over two weeks crafting the speech and went through five full drafts. All of that labor for a 272-word document about half the length of a college essay! To sum up: The more time that you dedicate to your essay, the better the product will be.
Now that you know what topics to avoid, your next question is likely this one: What should I write about?! Check out the following blogs for inspiration:
