The college essay
The essay carries more family anxiety per word than any other part of the application, largely because what it is actually for is rarely spelled out. It is not a writing test.
What it is actually for
The essay's job is to make one specific person recognizable on paper. Everything else in the application is a number or a list; this is the only place a reader hears the student's voice. A reader who finishes an essay knowing how a student thinks, what they notice, and what they care about has got what they came for. The subject can be small. Most of the best ones are.
There are two kinds of essays
The personal statement goes to most schools through the Common Application, runs to about 650 words, and answers one of a handful of broad prompts that you can look up online. Written once, most of the time.
Supplements are the extra questions individual schools may ask for, and the most common is some version of "why us." These are shorter, and there can be several per school. Schools are looking for individual, creative and thoughtful answers, so a good one can take some real research and some heartfelt introspection about the question. A "why us" that could be pasted into another school's form reads exactly as generic as it is. Answering it well requires knowing something specific about the place, which is one of the real payoffs of a campus visit.
When it gets written
The summer before senior year is the window that works. Applications open in August, the first deadlines land in late October or early November, and a student writing essays alongside a full senior course load and supplements for eight schools is a student who will submit something rushed.
A workable order: draft the personal statement over the summer, put it away for two weeks, revise it once school starts, then spend the fall on supplements, which is where the volume actually lives.
The exception is if the plan is to apply the moment the window opens. Getting an early application in to a school your student is very likely to get into settles the "will I get in anywhere" question early, and that peace of mind is worth building the summer around.
Nothing about this belongs in 9th or 10th grade. There is no groundwork to lay and no head start to be had.
Your role in it
This is the part worth getting right, because the failure mode is specific and admissions readers catch it.
Useful: keeping the calendar, reading a draft and saying which parts sounded like them and which did not, asking questions that make them say more, and noticing when they need a week away from it.
Damaging: rewriting sentences. An essay that has been smoothed by an adult reads like an adult wrote it, and it costs the student the one thing the essay exists to provide. Readers see thousands of these a year and are good at spotting them. A rough sentence in the student's own voice beats a polished one in yours, every time.
The most useful thing you can say to a draft is that a particular part sounded like them, and to ask what happened next.
Using AI to write it
Quite simply: Do not do it.
It is treated as application fraud, and your student signs a statement to that effect. The Common App's fraud policy covers submitting the output of an AI system as your own work, and every applicant certifies to it at submission. Running a spellcheck is not what this is about. Generated sentences are. A school that concludes an essay was not written by the applicant can rescind an offer after it has been made.
And it defeats the point. If the job of the essay is to show the writer, AI quietly invalidates every part of the writing that gave it that purpose. The result may read well, but it loses the soul and the character that made it worth anything to an admissions reader. Readers who see thousands of these a year describe the same tell: competent, organized, and empty of any particular person.
Protect yourself. A growing number of high schools now ask to see draft history on major work, and it is a good habit whatever anyone requires. Working in a document that saves versions makes revising easier, it shows the thinking, and a messy first draft is the most convincing proof there is that the writing is the writer's own.
Will the essay matter in a few years?
The essay's value to an admissions office has always rested on an assumption: that it came from the student. Once that assumption is widely in doubt, the essay stops being reliable evidence, no matter how good any individual one is. Admissions offices are aware of this, and the question they are working on is what to trust instead.
One answer is already visible in what schools have started doing: more weight on interviews, on graded work produced in class, on writing done under supervision, on recommendations from people who watched the student work, and in some cases a return to test scores as the thing that is hard to outsource.
If you are thinking about how to hedge, the transferable skill is being comfortable talking to an adult who is assessing you. Time spent on that tends to come from social clubs, presentations and the debate team, none of which need to be framed as college preparation to be worth doing.
If your student is two or three years out, the stable advice is grades and course rigor - no plausible version of this change makes transcripts matter less. Check what the schools on their list ask for when the time comes rather than assuming today's rules still apply.