Death to the Letter of Recommendation
It's time to ditch the least useful part of a college application
It has been a long time since my admissions counselor days, but I can still remember the feeling of anticipation I’d have when it was time to dive into a fat stack of admissions folders.
(This is how you know that it has been a minute - my admissions files were actual files containing actual paper. I had to look at screens too, I’m not that old, but when I read letters of recommendation, they were actual letters complete with real signatures)
Because I worked at a school that admitted most of its applicants most of the time, I didn’t actually review most of the thousands of applications that came from my admissions territory. Most of my applicants were so called “auto admits”, meaning that once a transcript evaluator entered in their academic info, if they met a certain score set by our algorithm, the computer admitted them1. This was both very efficient and occasionally awkward, like when I’d get a gushing email thanking me for admitting a student and I would have zero idea who they were because I’d never seen their application.
As a result of this process, I generally only read the applications for two groups of students: the ones at the very top end of the applicant pool that I was reviewing for scholarship or honors college participation and those at the lower end of the scale who were on the borderline between being an auto admit and and auto deny.
I liked reading the files of both types of students. I liked trying to get to know the student a little better, to see what they might bring to the campus, to find students who hadn’t met their full potential yet or who were already excelling in ways that inspired me.
I did not, however, usually enjoy reading letters of recommendation.
Now, before I dive into why I think letters of recommendation are quite possibly the most useless part of a college application and should be eliminated from the process, a few disclaimers:
There are plenty of schools that don’t require letters at all. It is entirely possible for a student to get admitted to many good schools without having to get a letter of recommendation. Yay! This is a good thing.
Some high school teachers and counselors work really hard to draft letters that are personalized, honest, and meaningful. I don’t want to diminish their work… I just want to be honest about how much value they actually add to the process
Not everyone in higher education agrees with me about this, so consider this a personal opinion/slightly spicy take. Please also use my usual caveat that I’m speaking only for myself here, not for any current, past, or future employers
There have been a handful of letters of rec that did actually sway my admissions decision… but not in the way a student might have hoped.
Okay, back to complaining!
I have several issues with letters of recommendation as part of the admissions process and would argue that the significance of those issues outweighs the value that most letters can bring to the admissions process.
Equity concerns: It is harder for some students to access quality of letters of recommendation than others, for reasons outside of their control. For example, I recall one student whose file was in my “borderline” pile. His academic record was kind of all over the place, with inconsistent grades from subject to subject and year to year. His lone letter of recommendation came from a teacher who basically said “I’ve only know this kid for a few months and he’s really quiet and shy2, but he seems to be trying really hard.” A closer look at the student’s file revealed that he was actually the child of migrant farm workers and the reasons his academic record was inconsistent was that he’d attended six different high schools in 3.5 years. Of course he didn’t have glowing letters … he’d barely been anywhere long enough for a teacher to get to know him. This student may have been an extreme example, but there are other students who might have similar struggles because of their economic situations. Maybe they don’t do any extracurricular activities because they have to work to help support their families. Maybe they aren’t the captain of a sports team because they couldn’t afford the athletics fee or to join sports programs when they were younger. Maybe they aren’t showing “exceptional leadership” or “commitment to school spirit” because they are just too busy trying to survive.
Privileging the already privileged: Occasionally there were students who’d include a letter of rec from a high profile person. I’ve read letters from politicians, professional athletes, and even a C list celebrity and while it was kind of fun to have that “oh, hey! look, a famous person!” moment, I don’t love the idea that having a famous name on their letter can open the door wider for some students. I suspect those famous names can have sway in an admissions process (especially if the famous name is an alum and it is a highly selective school) but should it? Aren’t the students who have enough access to people in positions of power, wealth, and fame probably to get letters from them likely to have lots of other advantages in life too?
Letters of limited usefulness: When you are an admissions counselor, you generally have an assigned territory. This meant, for me, that I would read all the files from the high schools in my territory. Over the course of a few years, I would see letters from the same teachers/counselors every year and it was pretty obvious that most of the letters all basically said the same thing. There was one counselor who was notorious for saying that every single student he wrote a letter for was “one of the best students I’ve ever worked with! A shining light!”. There were always letters that were clearly cut and paste jobs, sometimes with the wrong student’s name include, sometimes addressed to the wrong university. There were letters that were gushing but not specific and I mostly skimmed them, knowing I wouldn’t learn much about that actual student. The issue with these letters is that it isn’t the student’s fault that their letter might not have been helpful- they ask a teacher3 and they take their chances. Given the rise in the use of ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI that some counselors and teachers are openly using for working on letters, I suspect this problem is going to get worse and not better.
(If you’ve been reading me for a bit, you may note that this is at least the fourth or fifth time I’ve spoken negatively about generative AI/ChatGPT and you might get the impression that I’m not in favor of people using this kind of tech and/or that I just don’t like it. Good. That’s the impression you should have. I hate it.)
Letters of limited honesty: I still recall talking to a high school counselor who told me that “off the record, Student X is a real little shit who has been caught cheating on several occasions” Was any of that in Student X’s letter of rec from that same counselor? NOPE. The counselor had a personal policy to not write anything overtly negative in any letters, just because she didn’t want to have to deal with any fallout if the student or their parents ever saw it someday. Sometimes you can get a vibe that the recommender doesn’t actually want to recommend the student because they’ll go with in a damning with faint praise direction, but it makes it hard to fully trust any letters.
Now, all of these complaints are valid but that doesn’t meant that letters of rec can’t be helpful sometimes.
For students who may have had some challenging life circumstances, a letter of rec can sometimes be a good way to give the admissions folks a key piece of information that might not be readily apparent elsewhere in a student’s application. A student who really trusts their teacher/recommender can give them permission to share something (the student had a medical issue, their parents got divorced, etc) that might be helpful context to explain a dip in grades, for example. Or they can speak to a student’s talents in things like music or fine arts or other skills that might not be represented by their grades or test scores.
For admissions folks, those “damning with faint praise” or letters that are actually negative (rare, but it happens) can also be useful, though I think we need to have caution and recognize that teachers and counselors can have biases that influence which students they see as “energetic” versus the ones they see as “annoying” or “confident” versus “arrogant”.
But, ultimately, I suspect that most letters end up being a pretty meaningless part of the decision making process for most students. They certainly aren’t as important as grades, strength of curriculum, or even the essay in most cases.
Obviously, I’m not in charge of how college admissions works (oh that it were so!) and students and parents have to operate within the systems that currently exist, so I’m not encouraging anyone to boycott letters if they are required as part of a process.
(I know I have some folks who work in admissions/higher ed as subscribers - PLEASE feel free to disagree with me in the comments if you think I’m way off base here! Or even just slightly off base. I’m genuinely curious if there are people who do put a lot of weight on letters)
I will say, however, that if letters are an optional part of the process or if the student isn’t able to get the letter from their preferred teacher, maybe don’t sweat it too much. Let’s agree that it is okay to opt out of the optional stuff and save everyone a little time.
And if your kid isn’t the kind of student that is every teacher’s favorite? Don’t worry too much about if they’ll be able to get glowing letters of rec - it may matter a whole lot less than you might expect.
Yes, this still happens and more frequently than you might expect.
I have no evidence for this but I suspect extroverts get better letters of rec because teachers do love a student who’s willing to talk during class discussions
I don’t really blame teachers either. Some teachers get slammed with dozens and dozens of requests for letters of rec and likely have limited bandwidth to work on them.