Every fall I get some version of this question from a worried mom, usually in a lowered voice like she is confessing something: do you need a leadership position for college, because my kid isn’t president of anything.
This year the Common App answered it for me, and it did so in the most boring way imaginable. It renamed a section and made a box optional.
Stay with me, because that boring little change is louder than it looks.
What actually changed
For the 2026-2027 application, the Common App renamed the Activities section to Activities and Experiences. And the position or leadership title field, the box where your kid types President or Captain or Founder, is now optional.
That’s it. That’s the whole change. No press conference, no announcement your kid would notice.
Why a form change is not a small thing
The Common App is used by more than a thousand member colleges. It is infrastructure. Organizations that size do not restructure fields because someone in marketing had a nice idea. They change a field when the field is collecting worse information than the people using it want.
Translation: colleges told them the box was getting in the way.
That is a very different thing from a college saying something reassuring in an information session. This is the plumbing changing. And plumbing tells you the truth about a building.
Here's the part that should bother you a little
Think about what that box did for the last decade to a kid who had real responsibility and no title.
The girl who picked up her younger brother from school every single day at three and made dinner because both her parents worked. She sat down at that form and it asked for her position. She had three options. Make up a title that felt like a lie. Jam it into a category that didn’t fit. Or skip it entirely and put down something that sounded more like an activity.
Most kids pick option three. Quietly. Nobody ever sees the version they deleted.
That’s what a required field does. It doesn’t just collect information, it teaches kids what kind of information is worth having. And a whole lot of teenagers learned that the twenty hours a week they spent being responsible didn’t count as anything, because there was no box shaped like it.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how the job and the caregiving and the family business belong on that list, and I stand by every word of it. But I was making an argument. This is different. This is the form itself admitting the argument was right.
Now here's where most families are about to get it wrong
I can already see what’s coming, and I want to head it off.
“Optional” is going to get read as “skip it.” Parents are going to tell their kids the leadership box doesn’t matter now, and kids, who would love permission to fill out less of anything, are going to leave it blank.
Do not do that.
That box is fifty characters of free real estate on the single most competitive page of the application, and blank space does not help your kid. Optional means you are no longer forced to invent a title you don’t have. It does not mean the space stopped being valuable.
If your kid is a member, put member. That’s honest, and it is paired with an organization and a description that do the real work. If your kid’s role has a function but not a title, name the function. Caregiver. Shift lead. Tutor. Assistant coach. That’s not inflating anything, it’s describing what they actually do, which is the entire point of the change.
Blank tells a reader nothing. A word tells them something. Take the word.
Use every field on purpose
While we’re in there, the whole section rewards being deliberate, and almost nobody is.
Each entry gives your kid three pieces of room: about fifty characters for the position or leadership title, one hundredfor the organization, and one hundred fifty for the description of what they did. Ten slots total.
That organization field is bigger than families realize, and most kids type four words into it and move on. If the name of the group doesn’t explain itself to a stranger, use the room. A reader in another state does not know what your school’s service club is or how big it is. Help them.
And the description line, that hundred and fifty characters, is where the actual evidence goes. Strong verb, honest specifics, what your kid did and what came of it.
Then hit the preview button. The Common App has one, and hardly anyone uses it. It shows you the application the way a college actually sees it, which is not the way it looks while you’re typing. Things get cut off. Things read differently. Ten minutes with the preview button will catch problems that no amount of staring at the form will.
If you want the calm next step in your inbox every week while your senior works through all of this, that is exactly what my free weekly newsletter is for. Plain English, one thing at a time.
What this actually means for your kid
Your kid has spent four years learning to translate their real life into resume language, because that’s what the forms asked for. Babysitting became “childcare provider.” Working at the restaurant became something with the word “operations” in it. Taking care of a grandparent became nothing at all, because there was nowhere to put it.
The form just stopped requiring the translation.
So sit down with your senior and ask a better question than “what are your activities.” Ask them what they actually do with their time. All of it. The shift, the sibling, the grandmother, the thing they taught themselves at midnight for two years because they wanted to.
Then help them put it down, in the right box, with the words that are true.
Not because it will impress anyone. Because it’s real, and real is what the application was always supposed to be collecting. It just took the form a while to catch up.
