For the 2025-2026 application cycle, Common App decided to make no changes to their essay questions, but some significant changes are coming to the Additional Information section. After the COVID-19 pandemic, a question was introduced to ask about any COVID-related impacts on you or your family; later, it was changed to include natural disasters along with COVID. This year, they are changing the question from “Community disruption” to a new “Challenges and Circumstances” prompt.
This new prompt asks about a variety of hardships students may have encountered, ranging from health, to war, to having a safe, quiet place to work, and a lot of things in between. We are very happy with this change. We have always discouraged students from writing about their traumas or hardships in their main essays and have instead encouraged them to include this information in the Additional Information section. However, the previous Community disruption question was too narrowly focused, and Additional Information had little guidance to help students understand what should actually go in there.
In addition to this new prompt, the Additional Information section will go through some changes, decreasing the word limit from 650 to 300. Again, we are very pleased with this change. Some students like to use the Additional Information section as a whole new Common App essay or to rehash things schools would have already seen in their resume or activities section. This change will help limit frivolous additions to the Common App, and with the new Challenges and Circumstances prompt, it will be even more optional than it was before.
The Challenges and Circumstances Question
Let’s get into the specifics of the Challenges and Circumstances question:
Sometimes a student’s application and achievements may be impacted by challenges or other circumstances. This could involve:
Access to a safe and quiet study space
Access to reliable technology and internet
Community disruption (violence, protests, teacher strikes, etc.)
Discrimination
Family disruptions (divorce, incarceration, job loss, health, loss of a family member, addiction, etc.)
Family or other obligations (care-taking, financial support, etc.)
Housing instability, displacement, or homelessnessMilitary deployment or activation
Natural disasters
Physical health and mental well-being
War, conflict, or other hardships
If you’re comfortable sharing, this information can help colleges better understand the context of your application. Colleges may use this information to provide you and your fellow students with support and resources.
Would you like to share any details about challenges or other circumstances you’ve experienced?* If yes, please describe the challenges or circumstances and how they have impacted you. (250)
A long prompt, but we appreciate how fleshed out the examples are! When answering this question, being direct and concise is extremely important.
You only have 250 words to explain what you want to explain, and they’re not looking for a story here. They want you to plainly lay out what you’ve been dealing with and how it’s impacted your high school career. If your parents got divorced when you were 11, that’s not going to be incredibly relevant here – but if they got divorced when you were 17 and it forced you to move across the country and switch schools halfway through the year, that fits here.
If you are a student experiencing a major hardship, please reach out to us. We would love to talk to you and help you with your college application process.
Some things are so impactful that they should be included no matter what – the big stuff, like war, a significant health crisis, or homelessness. You might be wondering, so what shouldn’t go here? As a good rule of thumb, if you didn’t have to miss a lot of school, see your grades dip significantly, or if you come from a very privileged background, this may not be your section. For example, talking about how a hurricane damaged part of your beachfront house and how you had to live at a Hilton for a month is not going to come across well. Obviously, there are exceptions to this – but you want to be mindful of what you’re including here, especially when you take into consideration that some students will be writing about their refugee status or a cancer diagnosis.
Remember – filling out the Additional Information section is not going to excuse poor grades, per se, but it provides important context to help admissions officers see the bigger picture.
So What Goes in Additional Information Now?
Now that Additional Info has been cut to 300 words, and most of what we previously suggested for that section has its own prompt, you might be wondering what is still okay to put in Additional Information.
This should be a place for adding what you had to leave off – for example, under education, you may have taken coursework at more than three colleges or universities. You can put the fourth one here. Maybe you’ve taken a lot of online courses or obtained a variety of certifications – that could go here, too. Maybe your most significant activity (like the business or non-profit you started, or your tech start-up, etc.) needed a lot more than 150 characters, and you truly believe it’s reaaaally crucial that they hear the whole spiel – then you can put that here. Most colleges will expect you to submit a resume, so you don’t need to list out activities that didn’t fit in your Activities Section here; instead, include those in that aforementioned resume.
With these changes, we think it’s a lot clearer what students should and should not be including in their activities section. We always appreciate more structure and guidance for the students, and we’re happy with the Common App’s decision.
If you need help figuring out the Additional Information section, or have questions about what to include, please reach out to us today.