College Admissions Recommendation Letters are a Waste of Time
Rabbit island, Okunoshima, Japan
I’m deeply critical of recommendation letters in the college application and admissions process. In my second book, Surviving the College Admissions Madness, I argue that they’re a gigantic waste of time. They do not improve the chances of admission for 98% or more of applicants.
What happens when recommendation letters are forbidden?
Before I address recommendation letter policies at UT-Austin, let’s consider first consider an alternative example. The University of California, Berkeley forbids applicants from submitting letters entirely. Between their nine campuses, and if you include all freshmen and transfer applicants, the UC system receives almost 900,000 applications each year. Each of those apps is read by a human reviewer.
Consider that if each applicant submitted a recommendation letter or two, and if each letter takes at least a few hours to request, review, coordinate, write, and submit by the reference and the applicant and then reviewed by the admissions reviewer, that’s a few million human hours that the UC system saves the universe by not requiring them. I wish every university were like the UCs regarding recommendation letters and forbid them entirely from the process.
I use this example as a reference point for how much time and energy recommendation letters waste throughout the country. It’s at least tens of millions of human hours, particularly since many of the top 50 private universities, like Rice, MIT, or Stanford, require them for admissions eligibility.
Recommendation letters are inequitable
Although UT-Austin doesn’t, many universities also require a counselor letter of recommendation, which privileges applicants who attend exclusive private schools. Teachers and counselors at elite schools also have a lot more experience with writing letters.
Many public schools have counselor-to-student ratios of between 500 and 1,000. They don’t have time to mess around with rec letters on top of their other unpaid obligations. Every application item that universities require provides one more barrier for a low-income, urban, rural, or first-generation college student not to bother applying. Moreover, attaining potentially strong references privileges students who can sort out which teachers are the strongest writers and willing to dedicate adequate time to submit their best effort. Over-involved parents sometimes step in to pressure teachers to spend a lot of time on their child’s letter.
Despite many institutions that claim to support diversity, equity, and inclusion, 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 are vague, like most college essays.
According to the Common Data Sets, over 1,000 universities consider them in the admissions process. Even still, few universities rate rec letters as considerable or very important, so they themselves agree that it’s low on the hierarchy of what matters in the admissions process.
UT-Austin’s “outside letter” recommendation
The most frustrating part is that recommendation letters rarely affect the admissions outcome. UT-Austin added more confusion to the issue when it modified the language on its admissions page to “strongly encourage students to submit letters that come from outside of school.”
The idea UT had was not to pressure students to worry about getting letters, but like so many universities, they are entirely focused on its own policies. They fail to realize that since many top universities require recommendations and often from teachers, almost every competitive UT applicant will acquire letters at some point during their application process. What happened in practice when UT implemented this suggestion in Fall 2025 is that thousands of families scrambled to get letters from non-school sources like family friends or UT alum. I have no doubt UT received many thousands of references that added no new information to an applicant.
Unliteral policy changes are unhelpful
If a critical mass of universities made the same change, this change could make a difference. Unilateral changes will not produce UT’s stated intentions to reduce school staff workloads. If UT were sincere about its care for school communities and staff workloads, it would have forbidden recommendation submissions, as the University of California has for many years. The other issue is many UT Honors programs require teacher recommendation letters, and since most competitive applicants also apply to honors, the changes to the regular admissions recommendation letter recommendations become mostly irrelevant. The Office of Admissions left hand doesn’t seem to coordinate with the UT Honors programs right hand.
Teachers rarely submit personal recommendation letters
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. They make an effort to discuss with the student specific ways they’ve contributed to class, memorable projects, favorite lessons, obstacles the student has overcome, and providing context to their grades, like improving from a C to an A. Rec letters can be very compelling; they just rarely are.
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. Many teachers are not strong writers. With the emergence of ChatGPT, I’m certain that many references use AI to write their letters, which only adds to the mountain of AI slop that admissions reviewers see.
Recommendation letters rarely make a difference
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.
I also find that my clients spend a disproportionate amount of time and energy trying to gameplan who to ask and how to go about asking for letters. It seems like an exercise in futility since most rec letters aren’t very good, and they’re skimmed in less than a minute from reviewers. When I tell them all of this, the perspective goes through one ear and out the other as they scramble to get letters. Even submitting them to the Common App or My Status causes logistical complications, and sometimes, students miss early deadlines because their reference hasn’t uploaded these optional letters.
Overall, similar to the college interviews, recommendation letters are a giant mess, and if I could wave a magic wand, I would remove them entirely from the admissions process for all universities and programs.
I hope you enjoyed this post about how recommendation letters are a waste of time and rarely make a difference. The easiest way to reach me is by email kevin@texadmissions.com