College Recommendation Letters are a Waste of Time

In my previous post, I discuss how interviews are almost useless. In this post, I make a similar argument. Recommendation letters don’t make much of a difference for most students most of the time. It’s absurd that hundreds of universities went test-optional during the pandemic to supposedly increase access, yet none removed their recommendation letter requirements. Rec letters advantage the most privileged students and schools that have low counselor and teacher-to-student ratios.

My favorite finding from the college admissions commentary archives comes from January 7, 1979, with a refreshingly honest headline: “An Admissions Man Says It Isn’t So Hard.”  The Admissions Man is Richard M. Moll, a former Harvard and Yale admissions reviewer and then Director of Admissions at Vassar. An accompanying cartoon graphic features a nervous Yale admissions administrator cutting a house in two with a knife and fork as the family looks on.

Moll’s polemic on the application process reads the same then as today. He complains about non-standardized grading systems, “lifeless” essays, unhelpful interviews, and universities that possess all of the power at the expense of families. He cites the 1974 Buckley Amendment, more commonly known as FERPA, that struck down institutional confidentiality.

FERPA allowed students to view their reference letters, among other materials. In the years following the Buckley Amendment, Moll observes that teachers and principals are less inclined to write honestly about a candidate’s character or ability. “Principals, counselors and teachers fear that they might be sued if they boldly—and honestly—write on a college admissions form: ‘Martha’s record is rather good, but Martha is rather dull.’” 

Today’s Common Application strongly urges that applicants “waive” their FERPA rights so that they cannot see their recommendation letters. Reference letters remain mostly confidential, yet all recommendations are subject to the courtesy bias. Counselors and teachers are highly unlikely to write anything less than complimentary platitudes and superlatives.

Referees may feel flattered when someone asks them for a reference and feel subtle pressure to highlight positive characteristics. Reference letter hyperbole is the norm, muddying up the terrain for genuinely exceptional candidates to distinguish themselves from every other “best of” applicant.

Moll contrasts the contemporary watered-down recommendation letter with its origins. Reference letters originally formed the “old boy” system where a well-placed reference from people in power could pass an applicant through Ivy gatekeepers without further consideration.

Teacher and counselor recommendation letters remain a fixture at elite universities. Their precise role in holistic review remains unclear and subject to the whims of each institution. Some universities provide a separate score in their internal file review process, but recommendation letters suffer from vagueness, like most essays. It’s questionable how much utility a distinct recommendation letter score provides reviewers.

Ambiguities abound about which universities require, recommend, or allow letter submissions as an option. According to the federal Common Data sets, at least 1,000 universities consider reference letters as part of their admissions process. Like the proliferation of essay requirements at less-selective universities, campuses that could admit most of their applicants on academics alone still require recommendation letters.

Some universities explicitly require a core subject teacher, whereas others don’t. Many universities that require counselor letters—which provide context to a student’s course rigor or discrepancies between grades and test scores—request their submission on templates specific to that university. With more students applying to an increasing number of universities, counselors recreate the wheel many times.

When I worked for UT, there was no limit on the number of letters a student could submit. The record I observed was eight. Moll writes, “Now we say, ‘The thicker the folder, the thicker the kid,’ suggesting that a stack of unsolicited recommendations usually means an attempt to disguise a weak candidacy.” Recommendation letters are the most “try-hard” aspect of college admissions because students incorrectly assume that the quantity of letters matters more than the quality. It’s always preferable to submit a single strong letter where you’ve collaborated with your reference than four half-baked ones.

Except for interviews, letters are arguably the most time-consuming application item relative to the difference they make. For high schools with upward of 900 students per counselor, and with many US News top-100 private schools requiring counselor letters, references require tens of millions of work hours worldwide from already-overburdened high school staff. Fifteen percent of universities report that references are of “considerable importance” in the review process, less than the importance of essays but substantially more than extracurriculars and interviews.

Among the thousands of applications I reviewed for UT-Austin, I can recall less than ten times that an outstanding letter bumped up a student’s review score. Like college essays, most teacher reference letters aren’t especially well written or insightful. They’re vague, not specific to the student, and a repetition of what’s already on the transcript or resume. Students don’t provide adequate documentation about the specific examples or events they desire their letter writer to discuss.

“Brag sheets” often amount to regurgitation of what will have already been mentioned elsewhere in the application, so reference letters add little if any depth. They miss opportunities to discuss exceptional circumstances in favor of clichés. Consequently, references make claims like “Jared is the most promising student in my 20 years of teaching” without providing any evidence or examples to corroborate what makes Jared supposedly unique. When every letter claims a student is seemingly outstanding, that means nobody is. 

Rare are the teachers with reputations for writing excellent letters with a clear framework for students to request them. They have rigorous standards, decline more requests than they accept, and submit comparatively few letters. Other teachers are reference mills who churn out dozens each year. Most write superficial letters that could apply to most of their students most of the time.

High school teacher Andrew Simmons shares an educator’s perspective in an Atlantic essay, “The Art of the College Recommendation Letter.” Reference letters tending toward courtesy use loaded terms that “reduces students to bland shades of their real vibrant selves” or are blatantly misleading. “A ‘respectful, quiet’ student might sit in the back of class and never contribute to discussions. A ‘gregarious, social’ student may be a pain in the ass unless his talkativeness is harnessed for an academic purpose. A ‘late bloomer’ probably tanked his freshman year.”

As with college essays, it’s challenging to decipher what, exactly, the writer intends to communicate. Simmons observes that he and his colleagues, despite their best intentions, contribute to “admissions officers see[ing] hundreds of letters and encounter the same clichéd phrases and trite euphemisms again and again.” Teachers are busy enough sponsoring extracurriculars, attending staff development meetings, and other non-classroom commitments where they’re not compensated.

Admissions veteran Jon Boeckenstedt, formerly the Director of Admissions at DePaul University, calls into question the utility and fairness of recommendation letters in a March 4, 2016, Washington Post article.  He observes that the recommendation letter system has changed little in the past century. He questions their supposed utility “to illuminate nuances of character, intellect, curiosity, and special talent that help an applicant rise above the masses of otherwise similar students.” As with this video, he urges looking at recommendation letters from the students’ rather than the institutions’ perspective. Teenagers navigate the reference letter process blindly.

Attaining references privileges students who can sort out which teachers are the strongest writers and willing to dedicate adequate time to submit their best effort. Boeckenstedt writes, “The letter has virtually nothing to do with the student’s performance, and a lot to do with the teacher’s ability to turn a phrase, note interesting character traits, structure a cogent series of paragraphs that tell a story… In short, it’s as much about the teacher as the student.”

He makes the obvious point that students attending small college preparatory schools will receive more thoughtful letters from staff who know them better than their public-school peers. Universities that require counselor letters confer an added advantage to prep school or high-resource public school students who often have a dedicated counselor or a small army of staff members exclusively responsible for helping their students navigate university gatekeepers. Counselors at most public schools cater not to their highest tier, college-going students. Instead, they focus on resolving family crises, discipline issues, accommodating special needs students, identifying signs of abuse, and more routine drudgery such as schedule changes. .

Gaps in expectations about what kinds of students should receive bachelor’s degrees influence a recommender’s potential bias. An innovative longitudinal study evaluated two teacher’s perceptions of more than 6,000 high school sophomores. White teachers were more enthusiastic about the prospects of white students compared with their black classmates. “When teachers of different races evaluated the same black student, white teachers were nine percentage points less likely than their black colleagues to expect that student to earn a college degree. This gap was more pronounced for black male students than for black female students.”  Because black teachers are underrepresented in American schools, aspiring black college students have fewer opportunities to solicit reference letters from teachers who may be more supportive of their future goals.

Even though recommendation letters favor the privileged, are potentially prone to bias, and require a disproportionate amount of time relative to the difference they make for any given applicant, they’re likely here to stay. Students attending resource-rich schools experience burdens and pressure to secure the best references.

In contrast, students living in poverty are unlikely to understand their importance or have the wherewithal to secure high-quality letters at all. First-generation college students or children living in non-professional families may not have family members or friends to consult about navigating the reference process. Because many top universities require reference letters for admissions eligibility, reference letters erect barriers to college access.

Recommendation letter requirements expose the hypocrisy of universities that claim to value diversity and inclusion.