As college application season continues, teachers are flooded with writing student recommendation letters. Recommendation letters are a great way for colleges to learn about an applicant’s character and academic potential as a student and individual by receiving an opinion from someone who has seen them develop throughout their high school career.
However, as colleges get more competitive and applicants experience increased stress with writing essays and filling out the Common Application, are ample recommendation letters really going to make or break your college application?
The answer is, it varies. Many universities believe that recommendation letters are a useful part of a college application. Universities like Harvard, Stanford, USC, and others require one to three recommendation letters to be submitted as a part of the Common Application. These universities use recommendation letters as a way to help provide insight into an applicant’s abilities and personal qualities from outside perspectives and can help put the rest of their application in context.
Sarah Fischer, assistant vice president of admissions at Grinnell College in Iowa, shares her feelings about the positive impact recommendation letters have.
“Recommendation letters give us insight into any special circumstances that may have affected the students’ learning and they can shed light on the student’s life experiences, ” she says. “The teachers and counselors who carefully use the right adjectives and descriptors can truly let us know the student’s character, abilities and tenacity.”
Fischer, along with many universities, believes that recommendation letters can highlight qualities like leadership, empathy, and initiative, attributes that cannot be reflected by an applicant’s GPA or test scores. Another aspect to keep in mind is since many schools have become test-optional, colleges have become more reliant on other aspects of a student’s application, and this is another reason why applicants should strongly consider recommendation letters.
However, many colleges do not require recommendation letters. University of Texas at Austin, the University of Florida, and the University of California, Berkeley are all ranked in the top 50 universities and do not require recommendation letters. Additionally, University of California schools neither require nor accept letters of recommendation.
These universities have a multitude of reasons why they decided to either make recommendation letters optional or do away with them. The biggest idea, however, is that it traces back to the spirit of diversity and inclusion. Universities are well aware that guidance counselors and teachers at top high schools, who usually have a smaller student-to-faculty ratio, can prepare letters that give their students an advantage. So, eliminating recommendation letters altogether can help diversify the student makeup of the university, something that many universities pride themselves on.
Associate vice president for enrollment and marketing at Depaul University, Jon Boechenstedt, perfectly sums up the bias recommendation letters can have.
“Who is, on average, going to write the better, more complete, and more nuanced letter?” Boechenstedt began. “A teacher from a small college prep school where it’s widely understood that giving students every advantage in the college admissions process is a part of the job? Or someone in a large, public, under-resourced school where the range of abilities in each class is wider, and the number of students to get to know is greater, and the teaching load is probably higher?”
So which argument is right? This question’s subject nature makes it difficult for an obvious conclusion. It is on each applicant to decide whether or not they want to include recommendation letters in their applications. Each school interprets and weighs students’ applications differently. Recommendation letters are just one part of the stressful process of applying to college, and it is up to the student whether or not they submit them with their college applications this fall.
If you want some examples of good and bad recommendation letters and the message they send to admissions officers, click here: https://www.insight-education.net/good-vs-bad-recommendation-letter/
Sources:
