What Successful Harvard Applicants Wrote About in Their Common App Main Essays

The Ivy Institute | College Admissions Research | November 2026

Abstract

Identity and belonging was the most frequent primary topic, accounting for 21 of 88 distinct essays (23.9%), followed by intellectual inquiry (18, 20.5%) and family and intergenerational ties (12, 13.6%). No topic represented a quarter of the sample. An opening object was often a poor guide to the essay’s larger subject. Coffee preparation became a discussion of care in one’s work, while cooking with a grandmother became an account of inheritance. Allowing one secondary topic moved family into second place, appearing as a central or supporting subject in 28 essays.

Introduction

Consider two essays built around making something by hand. In the 2024 edition, one writer repeatedly bakes cookies and asks why the same recipe yields different results. Another makes crocheted animals, following a craft practiced by earlier generations. A list of activities would put both under hobbies. A reader asking what the essays are about would give different answers. The first investigates variation. The second traces inheritance. This distinction between subject matter and the claim made through it motivates the analysis.

Beck and Godley’s study of 20 exemplary essays from four colleges examined how writers present a distinctive self within a patterned genre [3]. The present study asks which concerns organize a longer run of examples from one publisher and how much the ranking changes when an essay may have two concerns. Differences in what students have the opportunity to write about are consequential. Alvero and colleagues documented socioeconomic patterning in a large undergraduate application corpus [4]. The present sample contains no comparable socioeconomic controls.

Publication history and sample

The print anthology 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays began in 1999. Subsequent editions appeared in 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017 and 2024. The separately packaged, sponsored online series can be traced through nine consecutive undergraduate editions, from 2018 through 2026. Its 2018 edition is independently identified in the Crimson’s own sponsorship materials [1–2]. The two formats overlap in content. For example, the 2026 journalism essay published under the heading George begins with the same newsroom assignment and opening passage as the sixth-edition publisher excerpt labeled Neb F. Publication year therefore cannot stand in for application year or establish a writer’s identity.

Ten placements in each of the nine online editions supplied 90 observations. The annual versions chosen for analysis here are the edition-year captures for 2018–2024, followed by the complete 2025 slideshow and 2026 presentation. The title, body and ending were distinguished from sponsor commentary. Two cross-edition repetitions were identified by comparing five-word sequences and inspecting the texts. The retained unit was the distinct essay (n = 88).

Method of topic coding

A single AI-assisted coding pass assigned a primary topic to every essay and one secondary topic where a second sustained concern helped explain the text. The primary code followed the change, question or relationship that organized the body and gave the ending its force. An object or activity mentioned once did not qualify as a topic. A secondary code required development beyond an incidental mention. Eight essays received only a primary code. The one-secondary limit makes the analysis auditable but understates some essays’ thematic breadth.

Table 1. Decision rules for the seven primary topics

Topic	What qualifies
Identity and belonging	The central question concerns membership, self-definition, labels or a relationship to a community.
Intellectual inquiry	The writer pursues a question, discipline or way of learning. The reasoning process supplies the payoff.
Family and intergenerational ties	A sustained family relationship, inheritance or obligation gives the essay its organizing meaning.
Service and civic action	Teaching, organizing, advocating or working for others provides the principal action and conclusion.
Adversity and recovery	The essay centers on responding to loss, illness, housing insecurity or another disruption.
Creative practice	Making, revising or performing work is the main concern, including writing, art and music.
Everyday habits and values	A routine, choice or practice develops a broader account of how the writer approaches life or work.

The decision rules distinguish adjacent categories by asking what the ending asks a reader to understand. For example, a family member can be the person affected by a loss. The narrative receives the adversity code when working through that loss organizes the essay, and the family code when the relationship itself organizes it. These decisions are interpretive. No independent second coder or agreement statistic is available. The essay register records the rationale so readers can challenge particular assignments.

Results

Figure 1. The organizing subject of each essay

Number of distinct essays, one primary code per essay

Identity and belonging21

Intellectual inquiry18

Family ties12

Service and civic action10

Adversity and recovery10

Creative practice9

Habits and values8

The two leading subjects account for 39 of 88 essays (44.3%). The two categories with ten essays are tied.

Table 2. How much does a second topic change the picture?

Topic	Primary	Secondary	Either role
Identity and belonging	21	11	32 (36.4%)
Intellectual inquiry	18	7	25 (28.4%)
Family ties	12	16	28 (31.8%)
Service and civic action	10	9	19 (21.6%)
Adversity and recovery	10	5	15 (17.0%)
Creative practice	9	14	23 (26.1%)
Habits and values	8	18	26 (29.5%)

Family was primary in 12 essays and secondary in 16. Everyday habits and values showed an even larger change: it ranked seventh as a primary topic and appeared in 26 essays across both roles, the third-highest total. Creative practice also supported more essays than it organized. Counting any mention would produce yet another distribution, particularly for topics as common in background detail as school and family.

How individual cases shape the ranking

In the 2018 collection, the writer called Jeremy opens with toy cars. The scale of the collection makes the subsequent loss of the family home legible. The cars return near the end, where their material value gives way to a question about what a family can keep. This case was coded adversity first and family second. A coding scheme based on opening nouns would misclassify it as an essay about collecting. By contrast, in the 2022 grandfather-and-butterflies essay, collecting is the activity through which a relationship is remembered and renewed. Family was coded first.

The 2024 cookie and crochet essays show how easily a subject heading can conceal a distinction. The cookie essay tests explanations drawn from chemistry and musical practice. Intellectual inquiry was therefore primary and creative practice secondary. In the crochet essay, a grandmother’s example, the labor of learning the craft, and a connection between generations give a finished object its meaning. Family was primary and creative practice secondary. A classification by pastime would flatten both accounts.

Two 2025 entries are labeled Claire. One uses remembered speech, a grandfather’s poem and a later performance to explore an intergenerational relationship. The other follows conspicuous shoes through a series of civic activities. The former was coded family, the latter service. Counting these as the same essay because their headings match would erase two different subjects. Conversely, counting the 2018 and 2022 punk essays separately because the displayed names differ would inflate identity and belonging.

Sensitivity and interpretation

With all 90 placements, the two leading primary topics were still identity (22) and inquiry (19). Omitting 2018 or 2020 from the distinct-text analysis produced a tie between them. Identity retained the sole lead in the seven other leave-one-edition-out analyses. A second check removed the three 2024–2025 entries explicitly reviewed by the commissioning organization (Sarika, Francisco and the first Claire). Identity still led, with 20 of the remaining 85, followed by inquiry with 18. The three-essay margin in the full corpus is also sensitive to coding: reassigning two primary identity essays to inquiry would reverse their order. The published counts support a leading pair more securely than they support a universal ranking.

No single subject was typical in the sense of describing most essays. The 21 identity essays leave 67 organized around something else. Family affected more narratives than its primary count suggests, while the visibility of an activity at the beginning often overstated its importance as a topic. These results describe how published pieces make meaning. They provide no estimate of an applicant’s chance of admission for choosing a particular subject.

Sources and disclosures

1. Staff of The Harvard Crimson. 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays. St. Martin’s Griffin. Edition records: 1999, 2005, 2010, 2014, 2017, 2024.
2. The Crimson Brand Studio and Crimson Business. Undergraduate successful-essay features, edition-specific sources: 2018 · 2019 · 2020 · 2021 · 2022 · 2023 · 2024 · 2025 · 2026. 2026 Crimson host · later 2022 edition page · Crimson sponsorship prospectus.
3. Beck, S. W., & Godley, A. J. (2023). “What makes you, you”: The discursive construction of the self in US college application essays. American Journal of Education, 129, 539–564. Publication record.
4. Alvero, A. J., Giebel, S., Gebre-Medhin, B., Antonio, A. L., Stevens, M. L., & Domingue, B. W. (2021). Essay content and style are strongly related to household income and SAT scores. Science Advances, 7, eabi9031. Publication record.

Study disclosure. Prepared for The Ivy Institute, which contributed professional reviews to the Crimson series, including in 2024 and 2025. Sponsor reviews, applicant profiles and advertising were excluded from the evidence. The study used publicly available information.

Data availability. The accompanying research supplement includes the source register, edition and duplicate identifiers, essay-level codes, full word-frequency table, feature definitions and reproduction scripts. Source links above lead to the original publications or their archived pages. All counts describe the specified editions as reconstructed on November 8, 2026.

Essay register by edition

Open an edition to check its ten placements against the source. The counts above give repeated texts a single observation.

2018 edition

1. Bobby — Creative practice • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
2. Phillip — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
3. Jessica — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
4. Jeremy — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
5. Emily — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Creative practice.
6. Marshall — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
7. Chad — Creative practice • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
8. Ariel — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Creative practice.
9. Margot — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Creative practice.
10. Janice — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.

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2019 edition

1. Sandra — Intellectual inquiry.
2. Laura — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Creative practice.
3. Kevin — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
4. Samantha — Intellectual inquiry.
5. Julia — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
6. Marina — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Creative practice.
7. Valerie — Intellectual inquiry.
8. Reginald — Everyday habits and values.
9. Christopher — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
10. Aiden — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.

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2020 edition

1. Sarah — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
2. Josh — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
3. Danielle — Identity and belonging.
4. Winnie — Creative practice • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
5. Lucien — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
6. Chaffee — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
7. Lessard — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
8. John — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Adversity and recovery.
9. Octav — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
10. Caden — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.

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2021 edition

1. Nicolas — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
2. Nikolas — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Adversity and recovery.
3. Abigail — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
4. Justine — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
5. Carrie — Creative practice • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
6. Jiafeng — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Creative practice.
7. Ella — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
8. Elizabeth — Creative practice • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
9. Alex — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
10. Anthony — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.

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2022 edition

1. Taras — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
2. Yukta — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Creative practice.
3. Eda — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
4. Lisa — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Creative practice.
5. Michelle C. — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
6. Tony — Intellectual inquiry.
7. Yueming — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Adversity and recovery.
8. Charles — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
9. Michelle G. — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Creative practice.
10. Sophia — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Creative practice. Repeat of 2018-08.

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2023 edition

1. Marina — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
2. Simar — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
3. Una — Creative practice • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
4. Georgina — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
5. Abby — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
6. Amy — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
7. Samantha — Creative practice • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
8. Connor — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
9. Tony — Intellectual inquiry. Repeat of 2022-06.
10. Sean — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.

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2024 edition

1. Sarika — Creative practice • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
2. Francisco — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
3. Billy — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
4. Lauren — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Creative practice.
5. Daniella — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Creative practice.
6. Clara — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Creative practice.
7. Orlee — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
8. Marcus — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Adversity and recovery.
9. Michelle — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
10. Michael — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Adversity and recovery.

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2025 edition

1. Claire — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Creative practice.
2. Alexander — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
3. Barry — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
4. Claire — Service and civic action • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
5. Isabelle — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Creative practice.
6. Olivia — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
7. Jinna — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
8. Carrie — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.
9. Janna — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Intellectual inquiry.
10. Emma — Family and intergenerational ties • supporting topic: Service and civic action.

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2026 edition

1. George — Creative practice • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
2. Omar — Identity and belonging.
3. My (Im)Perfect Life — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
4. Samantha — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Everyday habits and values.
5. Mitchell — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
6. Zoe — Everyday habits and values • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
7. Hayk — Identity and belonging • supporting topic: Service and civic action.
8. Jill — Intellectual inquiry.
9. Matthew — Adversity and recovery • supporting topic: Family and intergenerational ties.
10. Sarah — Intellectual inquiry • supporting topic: Identity and belonging.

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