Get Rid of Recommendation Letters
Letters of recommendation have become de facto required by most graduate programs in the United States. At least two, but most commonly three, letters are almost always yet another obstacle for students that feel increasingly pressured to gain post-baccalaureate degrees in the ever-intensifying educational rat race. Reference letters place an undue burden on their writers, cause anxiety for those requiring them, discriminate against workers, and are fraught with an implicit bias of gendered and racial language.
Berkley’s website explains that its required three letters “are a very important part of the application process” and should preferably be requested from a professor. Generally, many programs want at least one reference letter from a former professor but may loosen standards to accept letters from supervisors from those that have been out of academia for a bit.
Personally, when I applied for my MS several years ago, I had to ask three professors for recommendation letters. It was vastly easy at the time. I was applying for graduate school straight out of undergrad and had a lot of access to professors who had working relationships with the faculty members that would decide my fate. I was pretty shy and did not welcome the idea of having to ask anyone for such an ordeal as writing a paper on my positive attributes. Still, I overcame my reticence eventually when a professor encouraged me to apply to the program. I have no doubts that the idea of asking for recommendations unnecessarily hurt the quiet students. I would not have attended graduate school without that professor’s guidance.
Not everyone has a professor-mentor like I had. Certainly not at the large state schools where professors routinely find themselves teaching hundreds to thousands of students every semester. I was a bright but lazy student with a decent GPA lost in a wave of hundreds of other students in my degree path – what made me think I was “special” enough to go on to become one of the 15 graduate students for the graduate program?
Today, I find myself once again looking at graduate degrees to further my education. This time I am now several years graduated from college with limited options of professors for whom to ask for a reference. I still work in academia, so trust me when I say I am better off in this respect than most, but I still find the practice both antiquated and exclusionary. Most of the professors I was close with have moved on, retired, or most likely forgotten I existed.
Supervisors are an option – I am well-regarded by the faculty above me – but would require both an admission that I am looking to pursue another degree and that I could be pursuing fields and opportunities beyond my current career (which could hurt my immediate career prospects). I work in academia; I feel for those that work for private employers that may not grasp the importance of helping an employee achieve further education that could either cause the employer to have to pay a higher wage or receive less work due to academic demands.
It shouldn’t surprise that recommendation letters serve as a gatekeeping utility – that is clearly the design. They originated within academia in the early 20th century at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to limit the admission of marginalized groups. Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen details the origin of a meeting between deans of the aforementioned universities in 1918. A growing percentage of incoming students were East European Jewish immigrants; as one Harvard official put it, “the disinclination, whether justified or not, on the part of non-Jewish students to be thrown into contact with so large a proportion of Jewish undergraduates.” A series of detailed guidelines were formulated to measure potential incoming students beyond mere academic ability but also factoring in nebulous measures of character – recommendation letters were one of these character measures.
Still to this day, recommendation letters reaffirm entrenched systems of bias and inequality. Many studies have shown that letters written for men are more appealing to graduate committees than those written for women: men are routinely referenced as analytical while women are nurturing, which is not much of a selling point to graduate committees aiming for analytical candidates. The gender disparity is so well known that many institutions have installed guidelines to avoid bias in reference letters, albeit to little to no avail.
Racial bias in recommendation letters is no different. Studies show that admissions counselors are more responsive to prospective black students that present as apolitical rather than activist. Letters of reference for Black applicants typically have many phrases that may bias readers. Many programs warn that marginalized groups may have shorter reference letters and fewer accomplishments listed. For some reason, colleges believe that admissions can parse the difference between a biased letter rather than the proper solution of abandoning recommendation letters altogether.
An example of guidance from Montana State University reads as “letters of reference for POC can be considerably shorter and at times do not highlight publications or research quality, compared to letters for white scholars. Make sure you highlight critical research accomplishments of POC scholars in every letter!” and “In addition to being shorter, letters for POC are less likely to give ringing endorsements and only include minimal assurance (they can do the job’) or veiled praise (‘surprisingly sharp’) rather than a ringing endorsement (‘they are the best for the job’).” It is simply asking too much for both the writers and readers of references to avoid implicit bias – especially because the linguistic bias can be very minute and potentially tricky to overlook subconsciously. The best-case scenario is that you have marginalized prospective students achieve admittance by either lying or simply ditching their cultural and political leanings to appeal to admissions; similar to what legal scholars Carbado and Gulati found that most screeners prefer:
“good blacks” [who] will think of themselves as people first and black people second (or third or fourth); they will neither “play the race card” nor generate racial antagonism or tensions in the workplace; they will not let white people feel guilty about being white; and they will work hard to assimilate themselves into the firm’s culture. The screening of African Americans along these lines enables the employer to extract a diversity profit from its African American employees without incurring the cost of racial salience. The employer’s investment strategy is to hire enough African Americans to obtain a diversity benefit without incurring the institutional costs of managing racial salience. -Carbado, Devon W., Gulati, Mitu. 2013. Acting White? Rethinking Race in Post-racial America. New York: Oxford University Press.
It would be one thing if recommendation letters worked. They don’t. In fact, the average validity for references to job performance is only .13. That systematic review found the low validity resulted from leniency on behalf of the recommendation writer, insufficient knowledge of the applicant, and low reliability (references from two different professors for one applicant are often wildly inconsistent). A more recent meta-analysis of graduate-level references showed that a statistical model meant to predict GPA in graduate school was only improved by 1% with the inclusion of reference letters. Graduation rate prediction was increased by 6% by including references, which the authors admittedly thought was cause for some promise. Still, the authors’ recommendation of reference letters wasn’t glowing:
“Despite this troubling evidence, the letter of recommendation is not only frequently used; it is consistently evaluated as being nearly as important as test scores and prior grades (Bonifazi, Crespy, & Reiker, 1997; Hines, 1986). There is a clear and gross imbalance between the importance placed on letters and the research that has actually documented their efficacy. The scope of this problem is considerable when we consider that there is a very large literature, including a number of reviews and meta-analyses on standardized tests and no such research on letters. Put another way, if letters were a new psychological test they would not come close to meeting minimum professional criteria (i.e., Standards) for use in decision making (AERA, APA, & NCME, 1999).” - Kuncel, Nathan R.; Kochevar, Rachael J.; Ones, Deniz S. (2014). A Meta-analysis of Letters of Recommendation in College and Graduate Admissions: Reasons for hope. International Journal of Selection and Assessment, 22(1), 101–107. doi:10.1111/ijsa.12060
So, we have an antiquated gate erected with the express intent to exclude marginalized groups, and that to this day continues to bar intelligent prospective students that come from disadvantaged backgrounds. First-generation college students, low-income, Black, female… the list goes on of groups that have been studied and shown to suffer from the current recommendation process. To top it off, by excluding so many qualified candidates and emphasizing the importance of a more easily attainable requirement by well-connected students regardless of intelligence, the practice is almost entirely devoid of any real predictive measure of future success – the exact purported role of recommendation letters. It is time to ditch antiquated systems that perpetuate classism, and the lack of usefulness on the part of recommendation letters should make that action all the easier to accomplish.