Is It Time To Eliminate Letters of Recommendation?
Letters of recommendation or “LORs” have become integral to the college admissions process. They attempt to provide admission committees with information about the noncognitive qualities of prospective students and highlight their positive qualitative attributes. These letters can offer a college’s admission committee insight into a student’s creativity, philanthropic nature, and leadership skills, to name a few. But for many, LORs are problematic and riddled with implicit bias. “Third-party validation, what someone tells a person about you, remains an essential component of school admissions and advancing in most careers today,” points out the Pullias Center’s Julie Posselt. “Often, this ultimately takes the form of a letter of recommendation. These are powerful documents to which people dedicate a lot of time and effort. They are also one of the tools through which gender and racial biases and stereotypes are communicated and normalized.”
The LOR Legacy
For many Ivies such as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, letters of recommendation or reference became a required part of the application process in the early part of the 20th century. At its core, this application requirement was a way to limit admission to marginalized groups, including African-Americans, Catholics, and especially Jews. More recently, studies have revealed harmful disparities in letters of recommendation that favor white male applicants. These studies show that the content of letters is far too often biased against women, racialized people, and others who are outsiders to a university’s power structure. This type of gatekeeping has been noted in Director of the Center for Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Ted Thornhill’s recent study. For example, the study found white admissions counselors in historically white institutions responded more favorably to Black prospective students who presented as apolitical, compared to those who openly shared their social justice and/or antiracist activism.
Letters of recommendation can reveal much about the subject of the letter, but factors such as race, class, gender, and nationality can also shape the networks of who writes letters, and how these letters are crafted when a person agrees to author one. Consider how letters of recommendation impact academically qualified students who might not be as successful at building a network of teachers, bosses, and community leaders that could be authors of LORs. For countless reasons, prospective students from marginalized backgrounds may be unable to attend office hours and build rapport with their professors, to volunteer time in a research lab, work on honors projects, or to engage in other extracurricular activities that are typically mentioned in a LOR. Should these students lose out on academic advancement due to a potentially smaller network of individuals? The answer is no, but the fact is these students are often unfairly assessed as less prepared or less qualified.
The Future of Holistic Admissions
So, the question, then, is what to do? To be sure, letters of recommendation can be valuable, and we are not suggesting schools do away with them entirely yet. But there’s a difference between asking applicants to provide contact information for potential references and requiring them to procure several formal letters of recommendation in order to even complete an application.
There are a number of research centers and universities that are working to develop resources to make the process more equitable. For those tasked with crafting a LOR, Georgetown University’s Center for Research and Fellowship offers numerous resources that are helpful in “learning how to recognize, avoid, and rectify bias in letters of recommendation”. These resources include a gender bias calculator, a list of best practices for those composing LORs, and one-pagers that provide examples of language and phrases that are gendered and/or racially biased.
For students, Ivy Link experts offer up some key points on what makes an effective LOR. In addition, our experts can develop strategies to optimize your selection of and interaction with the writers of your recommendation letters to maximize the usefulness of those recommendations to your application. Contact us today to learn more!
