<p>This is such an alien concept to me. College is a time for kids to break free of the umbilical cord and stand on their own two feet. College entry should be based on their academic and personal accomplishments as perceived by the world at large. When does it stop? Do we write letters to future employers and spouses? Surely these people will want to know every nuance of Junior’s personality before making their commitments. And what about the kids who have had problems and want a fresh start in college, is it fair to put the tapestry of their young lives on display for the admissions committee? I guess we’re just at odds with the small liberal arts college mentality of ‘campus as family’. Every child has a compelling life story, independent of parental eloquence.</p>
<p>Perhaps the idea is to find students who have succeeded in spite of their parents! I am sure that shines through in some letters.</p>
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<p>True! I remember having extra sympathy for the Smith aspirant whose father wrote a pompous tome on his law firm’s stationery that seemed more about himself than about his daughter.</p>
<p>I have sexist parents who encouraged my brother with his b minus average to apply to Yale, but who discouraged me from doing the same with my a average. Any letter would surely have mentioned how the person who really deserved to go to the school was my brother and not me. I’m sure there are other sexist parents out there, those who play favorites, etc. Also, not all of us are given to bragging. I think these letters are a terrible idea.</p>
<p>“They can also lie through their teeth about all three, and unlike guidance counselors and teachers, they have every reason to do so.”</p>
<p>100% agreed.</p>
<p>I wrote one for d2 for Duke because it was either required or highly recommended, can’t remember which. It certainly never would have occurred to me to do it on my own. I pity the adcoms who have to slog through one for every applicant.</p>
<p>OT but still about parent recs - Weirdly, one of my kids’ high school GCs required a parent letter of recommendation in her file, which she said she’d refer to in writing her own rec. Several years later, another GC hinted to me that the original counselor would copy and paste parts of the parental letter instead of writing her own from scratch. Eek.</p>
<p>Those of us that homeschool have to do this all the time. We ARE the counselor!!! You are right, though. It is hard to do!</p>
<p>I’m very interested to hear more about the memorable letters Sally read.</p>
<p>My mother admitted to me years later that she thought I would be totally outmatched in the activities I cared about at Harvard. She would have done her best to write a glowing rec anyway, but I wonder if her doubts would have come through in the letter.</p>
<p>I would be very uncomfortable writing a recommendation letter for one of the kids. Not that I couldn’t find “nice” things to say about any of them, but simply because I don’t think that my observations have any place in the college evaluation process for applications.</p>
<p>Wrote one for S for Richmond. I totally resented the request. Spent addition 2 -3 hours crafting letter during an incredibly demanding time in our family’s life. </p>
<p>The Colleges that make these requests should post as additional/supplemental essay on the Common App! Just like kids preview the supplemental essays to see if they will apply to schools - full disclosure should include the “optional” parent requests! </p>
<p>Especially since you get the request after you submitted your $60 application fee. A bit of bait & switch?</p>
<p>I felt like it was checking up on the parents to see if they were “up to snuff.”</p>
<p>I think it is very interesting for a parent to articulate to a stranger what he finds special about his own child and I would personally recommend it as a valuable exercise it to all parents. </p>
<p>I was given the task of writing such a letter when our D applied to Smith in part because of our very close relationship. My wife is a Smithie and we met when she was in college so I knew the school well. Rather than discuss her academic achievements which spoke for themselves, I wrote about our very special father/daughter relationship. I wrote about when I cared for her as a newborn in the mornings when my wife had to be at work very early in the morning, about when I was her soccer coach in elementary school, about when we went horseback riding on the beach and camping in national parks in California. I wrote about her fight with Lyme disease and early vocation to help others as a physician. it was intensely personal but also exhilarating. My wife cried when she read the letter and I did not not show it to my D. Maybe I will show it to her when she gets married.</p>
<p>I think that it puts certain children at a real disadvantage and therefore is an unfair practice. I am an English major/ reading teacher who can write a mean essay. Plus I’ve read up on CC and a lot of books about essay writing/ college admissions. I know I can “sell” my D much better than many parents who lack the skills/ time or motivation.</p>
<p>I will admit that I spent a lot of time writing an essay about my D that was requested by guidance. I wrote it hoping that her guidance counselor could plagerize portions of it and include it in his recommendation letter for D. Can’t say that was or was not the case, but I certainly wrote up a storm and “packaged” her in the best possible light.</p>
<p>My daughter transferred to her high school after freshman year and it was a pre-k through 12 private school. At times, I felt as though she was at a huge disadvantage because nearly all of the other girls had been at the school for years and those who were writing recommendations for them knew them well. People have often read my daughter incorrectly throughout her years, so on some levels, I really would have enjoyed writing about her. She did all right without it.</p>
<p>I didn’t have time to read the entire thread, so sorry if this has been said already. I wonder if the real reason that a school would request a rec letter from a parent is so that they can see a writing sample from a parent and compare it to the students essay. You know, gauge how much “help” the parents provided.</p>
<p>Just weighing in here–
Our child applied to 13 [top] schools and none asked for parent letter. I had never heard of such a thing! I agree with the posters who cite the privileged position of the educated or articulate parent; and who point out that parental views are highly charged with the parents’ emotions and aspirations for the child. Were I a college admissions offider, I would not seek or honor parent letters unless I felt, for some inexplicable reason, that the multiple opportunities to know a child that are inherent in the current process were not enough. In short, c’mon! The child’s entire high school record, both curricular and extracurricular, is available; along with tiers of essays that enable the child to reveal him/herself, and letters from teachers and coaches and pastors and so on.
Morever, a school that “allows” parent letters is de facto making them mandatory. This is the “one notch up” nature of competition. This can put a lot of pressure on the parents and on their relationship with their children, and it puts children whose parents are not articulate or whose first language is not English at an unjust disadvantage.</p>
<p>Just my thoughts on a topic that surprised me. Interesting thread.
At any rate, if any schools had allowed parent letters, I would have slaved and produced a Pulitzer Prize winner, I suppose, given the stakes . . . . (Egad :))</p>
<p>We were not asked for a parent letter until after our D and S were admitted to school. They both go to Harvard and after they accepted the Freshman Deans Office asked for a letter from parents asking if there was anything we wanted them to know about our kids, quirks, likes, dislikes etc. My husband wrote funny notes about my D and then a year later our son. Not sure if it helped or not but the Resident Dean could quote things from the letter when she met us on moving in day.</p>
<p>I don’t think anyone here is giving the Admissions Counselors much credit. Of course they understand a parent LOR is going to be different in so many ways than a school or EC LOR. They are also aware that some parents are more adept in writing and some parents are not fluent in English. Ad Coms already know who the first generation applicants are and, often who the wealthier kids are as well as the parents education level and colleges and jobs; it’s all on the Common App. </p>
<p>Schools that are asking for this letter are holistic schools and are asking parents to help complete the picture, most of which is already completed. Ad Coms review thousands of applications and see thousands of these letters, they are pretty good at deciphering a complete application. These schools are looking for matches and fits not numbers.</p>
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It is very interesting - we had to write a letter for our kids’ GC. I suppose if I’d had to I’d have sent a very similar letter to the colleges, but I’d have worried a lot more about it.</p>
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<p>It’s hard to remember specifics after all these years, but I do recall that the most effective parent letters often provided details that expanded information on the application but which the applicant herself would have been unlikely to reveal. For instance, one girl had written “Babysitting-8 hours/week” on her application, but she hadn’t mentioned that she worked for free for a neighbor who was going through chemotherapy.</p>
<p>Indeed, it was often such random acts of kindness that emerged from the parent letters. In fact, one of the ironies of this crazy process is that the kids who are the most giving and the most concerned about others are not necessarily those who claim a gazillion hours of community service on their applications. They may instead be the ones who babysit for the ailing neighbor, defend classmates against a bully at the lunch table, or invite the school outcast to join a group movie junket despite the protests of other participants. This is the kind of stuff that parents often see and that school officials and teachers may not. It’s also the kind of information that many students with the finest character would never dream of reporting on an application.</p>
<p>Sure, savvy parents can fabricate heart-wrenching anecdotes, and some of these will stump the admission folks’ inner lie detector. But admissions cheating is rampant everywhere … on SATs, on essays, on resumes inflated beyond recognition, and even occasionally on guidance counselor references. Thus it’s impossible to eliminate all aspects of the admissions process that invite dishonesty.</p>
<p>So, if I were a college admissions dean, I would still solicit optional parent letters, despite the inevitable flaws that come with the request.</p>
<p>As if parental educational background and success didn’t already have enough impact on a student’s own academic performance, we should increase that? Bad idea. I’m not sure the letter from a friend, which Dartmouth requires, is much better. When my S was a high school junior, he was asked by an acquaintance to write this peer recommendation. You had to feel for the applicant. He was brighter than average and clearly had aspirations to rise above his background, but the kids who knew him best were low-achieving friends from his neighborhood and similarly academically weak teammates–none of whom he could trust to do an adequate job. So he asked my son, who was really only an acquaintance, but was deemed literate, smart, and reliable enough. The kid begged S to pretend he’d known him a long time. S did the best he could without lying, but had limited material to work with as far as observations of the young man.</p>