In 2010, Missouri state champion swimmer Shannon McCoy had her acceptance to Colorado State University (CSU) rescinded after the school received a letter of recommendation from her counselor, which claimed she possessed “below average” traits such as initiative, character, integrity, leadership, and a commitment to service. McCoy, claiming she had been defamed by a libelous letter from a counselor who “never knew [her],” sued the counselor and the school and won. CSU restored her scholarship.
McCoy’s story exposes an overlooked college-applications problem: the counselor recommendation letter. Princeton still requires a counselor recommendation letter to apply, but to increase equity, inclusivity, and fairness in the application process, it’s time for us to end that practice — and hopefully inspire other colleges to follow suit.
Interactions between students and counselors vary dramatically between private schools, well-resourced public schools, and poorly-resourced public schools. For some, securing a counselor recommendation involves a years-long process to make a positive impression on — and build a relationship with — their counselor; for others, a single interaction is the only opportunity they get to make such an impression.
According to a former associate director of admissions at Brown University, private school counselors are sometimes responsible for as few as thirty students, giving them the time and access to carefully craft excellent recommendations for every student. Meanwhile, at public schools, especially in low-income areas where student-to-counselor ratios can climb to 1000:1; the students may never even meet their counselor before the semester they need the recommendation.
These aren’t outliers. At low-income public schools, students have consistently lower levels of access to counselors than at higher-income or private schools. In addition, researchers at the University of New Hampshire found that “poor, diverse, and city school districts exhibit particularly high student-to-counselor ratios,” even when compared to other public school districts that are more affluent.
As a result, counseling services at these schools tend to be greatly limited in their ability to give students much-needed individualized attention, and counselors receive little support for writing what can become a colossal number of college recommendations.
I graduated from one of these high schools. My school was doing its best; on a limited public-school budget in a state that consistently fails to fund public education, it still managed to provide counselors for its student body. However, due to limited resources, each student’s interactions with their counselor were limited. I did not have any in-person interactions with my counselor until my senior fall, by which point I was already in need of a counselor recommendation to be able to apply to elite universities, including Princeton.
At that point, my counselor managed to fit me in for a meeting that lasted less than an hour, where he asked basic questions to get to know me in order to write my recommendation. He admitted that, for most students, he and other counselors resorted to using a template to produce hundreds of cookie-cutter recommendations at scale.
Princeton isn’t in the dark about this. They openly acknowledge that some students have little or no access to their counselors; the undergraduate admissions website states that, “If your school does not have an adviser for students applying to university, please ask a school official … to complete your School Report.”
But this is clearly insufficient: “school officials,” who likely don’t even have “writing these recommendations” in their job description as counselors do, cannot take the place of a good counselor, who would ideally be familiar with each of their students on a personal level.
Even further, because of the limited face-to-face time that most students from under-resourced schools receive, counselors might resort to including bias-driven information. When counselors are less familiar with students, the counselor is affected more by their first impression of the student, which is shaped by implicit biases like those surrounding race and gender.
A recent Brown University study found that there are “large and noteworthy” disparities in the length and content of counselor recommendations “across nearly all demographic groups … in alignment with known inequities.” I find myself wondering how my experience might have differed had I not been ostensibly white and a man. And in a post-affirmative-action world, it is increasingly difficult for admissions officers to assess the impact that implicit biases might have on a recommendation letter and increasingly important to eliminate sources of bias in admissions.
This inequity — bias introduced directly through individuals rather than transmitted through systems, like the SAT — is more pervasive and less detectable than the structural inequities. To overcome it, students would have to have first been assessed on a personal level, and the school on a structural level, outside of the counselor recommendation, thereby already giving the University a completed picture of the student’s life context.
If the University has that context, then the counselor recommendation is unnecessary because it adds nothing new to the application; if it does not, the letter produces and perpetuates long-standing inequities, discriminating against students from historically disadvantaged groups.
Yet Princeton, and all but two of the top 15 higher education institutions in the United States, still require a counselor recommendation.
MIT, which does not require the recommendation, explains why not on its website.
“Some school counselors do not or cannot write letters on your behalf … you will not be penalized in this case.”
The University of Chicago, too, has made it optional.
But making the counselor recommendation optional does not go far enough.
Princeton must abolish the counselor recommendation entirely. Today, it is more of a reflection on the resources of the high school and the biases of the counselor than the merits of the individual student.
Making it optional is not enough — this would only create greater inequities between the student with the motivated and well-resourced counselor and the student with limited counselor access. Thus, Princeton must stop accepting a counselor recommendation at all. And any university that is serious about maintaining diversity and inclusion in the post-affirmative action era must follow suit.
By updating its admissions processes to better reflect the realities of systemic inequities and their impact on individual students, Princeton has a unique opportunity to build an inclusive and diverse University community on the foundation of that commitment. All it has to do is act.
Isaac Barsoum is a first-year contributing Opinion writer from Charlotte, N.C. intending to major in Politics. He believes that loving Princeton means finding ways it can become a safer, happier, more inclusive place. You can reach him at itbarsoum[at]princeton.edu.
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