Counselor Recommendation Letters: A Double-Edged Sword in Selective College Admissions (Research in Higher Education)

A new peer-reviewed study published in Research in Higher Education (July 2025) by Andrew S. Belasco, Katherine W. S. Lee, Su Yeong Song, and Michael N. Bastedo offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of how counselor recommendation letters contribute to inequality in U.S. college admissions. Analyzing more than 615,000 counselor letters submitted through the Common Application between 2018 and 2020, the authors applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to uncover disturbing disparities in both letter length and thematic content based on students’ race, income level, school type, and test performance.

The study’s central finding is that counselor letters are far from neutral documents. Students from private schools and high-income families consistently received longer, more detailed letters, filled with praise across academic, extracurricular, and personal domains. These letters often emphasized qualities that align with the expectations of elite college admissions readers, such as leadership, initiative, and intellectual promise. In contrast, students from low-income backgrounds, especially those who received application fee waivers, frequently received letters that emphasized personal character or resilience over academic achievement. While these letters were sometimes longer in length, they were less likely to describe students' performance in key areas like academics or extracurricular activities. First-generation college students were particularly disadvantaged, receiving the shortest letters across all measured categories—even among top scorers.

The racial disparities revealed in the study were also striking. Black and Latinx students received significantly shorter letters than their white and Asian American peers, even when controlling for school and counselor characteristics. Their letters were less likely to highlight academic strengths, artistic or athletic talents, and extracurricular leadership. These inequities were still evident among students scoring in the 95th percentile or higher on standardized tests. Asian American students, while receiving longer letters on academic ability, were frequently described in narrower terms, with fewer references to personal qualities or well-roundedness. These findings point to entrenched patterns of racial bias, even when counselors intend to advocate for their students.

The authors of the study—Belasco, Lee, Song, and Bastedo—argue that these disparities are not solely the result of individual counselor prejudice. Instead, they are structural, tied to the unequal distribution of resources and caseloads across public and private schools. Private school counselors typically serve far fewer students and often have deeper relationships with them, enabling more comprehensive and personalized letters. Public school counselors, particularly in underfunded districts, may be responsible for hundreds of students and lack the time or information to write in-depth recommendations.

These inequities matter because counselor letters continue to play a major role in holistic admissions, especially at highly selective colleges and universities. Although some admissions officers make efforts to read letters within the context of a student's environment, there is little consistency across institutions. When letters are interpreted without such context, the gaps in length and substance can serve to amplify the advantages already enjoyed by privileged students.

In response to these findings, the authors recommend a series of policy changes. They advocate for better training for admissions readers to evaluate counselor letters with an understanding of school context and structural inequality. They also suggest that schools and districts develop more standardized approaches to writing letters to minimize variation. Furthermore, the study raises serious questions about whether counselor recommendations should be required at all—particularly in public university systems. Institutions such as the University of California and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign have already made counselor letters optional or eliminated them entirely, citing equity concerns.

The research adds to a growing body of literature that challenges the fairness of so-called holistic review processes. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning race-conscious admissions policies, colleges and universities are under increased scrutiny to ensure that alternative measures, such as essays and recommendation letters, do not serve as covert pathways to replicate systemic bias. This study indicates that without intentional reform, recommendation letters may continue to function as gatekeeping devices that privilege whiteness, wealth, and access to elite educational institutions.

As U.S. higher education grapples with questions of access and equity, this study from Belasco, Lee, Song, and Bastedo provides a data-driven reminder that well-meaning admissions tools can still reproduce injustice. Colleges that are serious about fair admissions practices must confront not only who writes these letters—but what they contain, what they omit, and how they are interpreted.

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Sources
Belasco, A. S., Lee, K. W. S., Song, S., & Bastedo, M. N. (2025). School Counselors, Structural Inequality, and Recommendation Letters in College Admissions. Research in Higher Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11162-025-09847-5
Stevens, M. L. (2009). Creating a Class: College Admissions and the Education of Elites. Harvard University Press.
Jack, A. A. (2019). The Privileged Poor: How Elite Colleges Are Failing Disadvantaged Students. Harvard University Press.
Bastedo, M. N., Bowman, N. A., Glasener, K. M., & Kelly, J. L. (2018). What Are We Talking About When We Talk About Holistic Review? Journal of Higher Education.
Carnevale, A. P., Rose, S. J., & Cheah, B. (2011). The College Payoff: Education, Occupations, Lifetime Earnings. Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce.
National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). (2019). State of College Admission.

Juneteenth in New Jersey: The Complicity of Higher Education in Slavery

New Jersey’s legacy as a “slave state of the North” is often overlooked, especially in the sanitized histories of its most prestigious universities. Yet a closer examination reveals that the state’s institutions of higher education—particularly Princeton University and Rutgers University—were not only complicit in slavery, but were active beneficiaries of racial exploitation. Their histories are deeply intertwined with a system that built wealth and social power through the bondage of Black people.

This article is based on the findings of For Such a Time as This: The Nowness of Reparations for Black People in New Jersey, a landmark report from the New Jersey Reparations Council. The report is an urgent call for transformative change through reparative justice. It draws a direct throughline from New Jersey’s foundational embrace of slavery, through its Jim Crow era and more recent forms of structural racism, to today’s reality of “Two New Jerseys”—one Black, one white, separated by a staggering $643,000 racial wealth gap between median Black and white family wealth.

Princeton University: Built by the Enslaved, for the Elite

Founded in 1746 as the College of New Jersey, Princeton University’s early leadership reads like a roll call of slaveholders. Nine of its first presidents enslaved Black people. At least five brought enslaved individuals to live and labor on campus—including Aaron Burr Sr., who in 1756 purchased a man named Caesar to work in the newly built President’s House. Another, John Witherspoon, signer of the Declaration of Independence and president from 1768 to 1794, kept two people in bondage and spoke out against emancipation, claiming that freeing enslaved people would bring “ruin.”

Financially and culturally, Princeton thrived on slavery. Many of its trustees, donors, and faculty enriched themselves through plantation economies and the transatlantic slave trade. Historian Craig Steven Wilder has shown that the university’s enrollment strategy was deliberately skewed toward elite southern families who owned enslaved people. From 1768 to 1794, the proportion of southern students doubled, while the number of students from New Jersey declined. Princeton became a finishing school for the sons of America’s racial aristocracy.

Slavery was not just in the background—it was present in the daily life of the institution. Enslaved Black people worked in kitchens, cleaned dormitories, and served food at official university events. Human beings were bought and sold in full view of Nassau Hall. These men and women, their names often lost to history, were the invisible labor force that built the foundation for one of the wealthiest universities in the world.

The results of this complicity are measurable. Princeton graduates shaped the American Republic—including President James Madison, three U.S. Supreme Court justices, 13 governors, 20 senators, and 23 congressmen. Many of them carried forward the ideologies of white supremacy and anti-Black violence they absorbed in their youth.

Rutgers University: Queen’s College and the Profits of Enslavement

Rutgers University, originally established as Queen’s College in 1766, shares a similarly grim legacy. The college’s early survival depended on donations and labor directly tied to slavery. Prominent among its early trustees was Philip Livingston, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who made his fortune by trading enslaved people and operating Caribbean plantations.

Enslaved labor helped build Rutgers, too. A man named Will, enslaved by the family of a college trustee, is among the few individuals whose name has survived. His work helped construct the early physical campus, though his story, like so many others, is only briefly mentioned in account books and correspondence.

The intellectual environment of Queen’s College mirrored the dominant racial attitudes of the time. While some students and faculty opposed slavery, their voices were overwhelmed by an institution that upheld the social, political, and economic status quo. Rutgers, like Princeton, prepared white elites to rule a society built on racial exclusion.

Toward Reparative Justice

The For Such a Time as This report from the New Jersey Reparations Council underscores that the legacy of slavery is not a relic of the past—it is embedded in the material realities of today. New Jersey’s racial wealth gap—$643,000 between Black and white families—is not accidental. It is the result of centuries of dispossession, disinvestment, and discrimination.

The state’s leading universities played a formative role in that history. Acknowledgment of this fact is only a first step. True reckoning means meaningful reparative action. It means directing resources and power toward the communities that have been systematically denied them. It means funding education, housing, healthcare, and business development in Black communities, and making structural changes to how wealth and opportunity are distributed.

Princeton and Rutgers are not just relics of the past; they are major economic and political actors in the present. As institutions with billion-dollar endowments and vast influence, they have both the means and the moral obligation to contribute to a just future.

The question now is whether they will answer the call. 

The Case for Equity at the University of Colorado Boulder (James Michael Brodie)

 

Press Release

 

The Black and Gold Project Foundation

For Immediate Release

Nov. 3, 2022

 

Contact: James Michael Brodie

(443) 739-3613

boulderblackandgold@gmail.com

 

 

The Black and Gold Project Foundation’s Case for Equity at

the University of Colorado Boulder

 

The commitment of many major institutions of higher learning to educate all qualified students, regardless of where they came from or the depth of their parents’ purses, has long fallen short of the institutions’ collective mission and vision statements.

These institutions have, by design, left out large segments of the population, both statewide and nationally, creating an academic environment based more on cultural preference than on intellectual excellence. This has been particularly the case when it comes to the enrollment, retention, and graduation of African Americans as students, as well as in the hiring of African American professionals.

 

The attached whitepaper, titled “The Case for Equity at the University of Colorado Boulder,” authored by the Black and Gold Project Foundation, focuses on the University of Colorado Boulder. The Foundation notes that the situation discussed in this paper reflects similar circumstances all over the United States.

The United States Supreme Court is hearing a case that seeks to eliminate affirmative action programs in higher education, focusing on Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The conservative Court has signaled that it intends to end the programs.

 

The Foundation’s argument has never been about enrolling lesser qualified students. Rather, we stand in opposition to enrollment policies that reward wealthy, white, and/or legacy students, who are academically less qualified than the African American students routinely overlooked by these institutions.

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The Black and Gold Project Foundation is a nonprofit organization. Members include graduates of the University of Colorado, current and former faculty/staff, current and former students, and friends and supporters.

 

The Foundation envisions the significantly increased presence of African American students, faculty, staff, and administrators on the University of Colorado Boulder campus.

 

Our mission is to hold the University accountable to honor its commitment to its own CU Vision Statement which states: “The University of Colorado will be a premier, accessible, and transformative public university that provides a quality and affordable education with outstanding teaching, learning, research, service, and health care. Through collaboration, innovation, technology and entrepreneurship, CU will expand student success, diversity, and the economic foundation of the State of Colorado.”