The Leadership Title Just Became Optional. Common App's Own Research Explains Why.
Fifty characters sat at the top of every entry in the Common App's activities section, under the label position or leadership description. Until this month, you had to put something there. On the 2026-27 application that opened August 1, you don't. Students now answer a yes-or-no question about whether they held a title, and only the ones who say yes get the box.
Common App renamed the section as well, from Activities to Activities and Experiences, relabeled several categories (Work (paid) is now Employment or work (paid); Junior ROTC is now ROTC and Military), and added fields for what students plan to do after graduation. Character limits held steady: 50 for the title, 100 for the organization, 150 to describe what you did. So did the number of slots. There are still ten.
Remove the nameplate
That last detail is the one to sit with, because Common App's own researchers spent years arguing the slots were the problem.
In work published through the Annenberg Institute at Brown, a team led by Julie Park at the University of Maryland, working with Common App's Brian Heseung Kim, ran natural language processing across 6,054,104 applications from the 2018-19 and 2019-20 cycles. Every applicant in the sample had applied to at least one college admitting 40 percent or fewer. The researchers built a keyword dictionary for what they termed top-level leadership: captain, president, founder, CEO, chairwoman, editor-in-chief. They wrote exclusion rules so that assisting the captain or interning for the CEO wouldn't register. Then they counted.
The raw counts split along income lines about as hard as you'd expect. Applicants who received no fee waiver averaged 1.05 activities carrying a top-level title. Fee waiver recipients averaged 0.66, a difference of 59 percent. White applicants reported 68 percent more such activities than Black applicants; Asian American applicants reported 71 percent more.
Then the researchers ran the division. Of the activities a given student listed, what share carried a top-level title? Across every racial group and both income measures, the answer landed between 0.13 and 0.15. Call it one activity in seven, for everyone.
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Inspect the denominator
The title field, in other words, partly reflects the denominator. At a hypothetical one-in-seven rate, ten activities produce about 1.4 title-bearing entries and five produce about 0.7. That illustration does not measure any student’s leadership capacity or prove the cause of the observed gap. It shows why raw title counts should not be read independently of opportunity and the number of reported activities.
The plain-language summary Common App put out in April 2023 didn't soften any of it. The brief's first stated finding describes "stark and substantial differences" in how many activities applicants reported, across nearly every measure of race and socioeconomic status. Its closing recommendation was concrete: limit how many activities students are asked to list. The academic paper named a number, suggesting four or five.
That August, Lafayette College did a version of it. President Nicole Hurd announced that the admissions office would read only the first six entries, arguing that the ten-slot form could suggest to students and families that "quantity matters more than quality, that getting into college is about filling in blanks." Jenny Rickard, Common App's CEO, endorsed the move in Lafayette's announcement and cited the disparity data by name. Lafayette's admissions site still describes the six-activity policy today, three cycles on.
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Make real work visible
Common App itself did not follow. Ten slots stood through 2023-24, through 2024-25, through 2025-26, and they stand now. Among the applicants Park's team studied, 34 percent used all ten. Only 1.5 percent listed none.
None of that makes this year's change cosmetic. The old requirement produced a specific and daily absurdity in counseling offices. Claire Schadler, a college admissions coach at LifeLaunchr, described students carrying real caregiving loads who weren't sure the work "counted as an activity," because the form opened by asking for a role. Her colleague Venkates Swaminathan put the mechanical version of it plainly during the same July webinar: there is no title for looking after a younger sibling. A student who spent twelve hours a week doing it had to invent something, downgrade it to the description field, or leave it off entirely. Paid work sat in the same trap. So did most hobbies, and a good share of what students do with a family business.
Freeing the field fixes that, and the fix is worth something. What it doesn't do is change what the section rewards.
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Write the contribution
The advice around the box hasn't moved either. In that July session, Swaminathan walked through model entries for the activities list and told students to lead with accomplishment and recognition. His sample entry for a DECA member opens by naming the presidency. He is not wrong about how the section is read. But a student hearing both messages in the same hour, that the title is optional and that the title should come first, is receiving accurate information about a form that has changed less than its label suggests.
The new mechanic also does something the old blank box could not. An empty field is ambiguous, and a reader working through a thousand applications cannot tell whether a student held no position or simply ran out of characters. A recorded "no" is an answer. Whether admissions readers weigh those two identically is not the kind of thing anyone publishes, and this is the first cycle in which the question exists to ask.
For a senior filling this out in the last week of August, the practical reading is narrow. Nothing now requires you to manufacture a title for something that never had one, and the categories have widened enough that paid work, caregiving and a serious hobby all have somewhere to sit without apology. That is a real reduction in the amount of fiction the form demands.
The section still holds ten lines, though. The research associates reporting patterns with unequal access to time and opportunity; it does not establish that filling every line causes admission. Students should not pad the list. What arrived this cycle was a smaller obligation on each entry, not an instruction to manufacture more activities.
For the broader writing context, read our analysis of why disappearing essays can complicate an application.
Let the contribution carry the entry.
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Bring the evidence back to your own decision.
The practical takeaway is not a universal shortcut. It is a better question to ask before the next application decision. Keep your worksheet, verify requirements at the source, and return to the parts of the file you can actually improve.
For individual planning, contact The Ivy Institute. Continue with our guide to purposeful supplemental writing when preparing a response a college still requires.
Sources, scope and editorial notes
This is analysis based on the supplied article and linked sources, not firsthand reporting or legal advice. Factual corrections and qualifications were made before publication. Illustrations and worksheet mechanics are explanatory; they do not represent official application screens or predict outcomes. Policies can change: verify the current college, program or platform instructions before acting.
