Not Recommended

Ian Ayres

 A few days ago I received the following email:

Dear Professor Ian Ayres,

It's Jesse from FlyingEdu Hong Kong. We mainly provide services for students who are applying for future study programs.

Some of them are of outstanding performance, but they will need the authorities' recommendation to accomplish the application process. In this case, we wish to connect you and our students. We would send you their CVs, arrange online communication to help you know them better, and you could choose to assign homework to help evaluate. In return for your assistance, handsome rewards would be given (about 10000usd/month). Also, the content of the recommendation letters can be further discussed with you.

Please feel free to reply or message me when you are available. Looking forward to further contact and cooperation with you.

Email：x@flyingedu.org

Regards,

Jesse

Senior Business Manager of FlyingEdu HongKong

Website:

http://www.flyingedu.org

Part of me was appalled by this concept. Paying substantial sums for recommendations gives the children of rich people yet another leg up. And might the recommendation fraudulently misinform the recipient? What’s next — paying for book blurbs? The whole endeavor seems super sketchy — including using a “.org” website at what screams out as a for-profit business.

I forwarded the email to a colleague who responded in part:

Yeah, I got the same email. The thing that makes this case so clearly unethical is that it’s so brazen. They are more or less openly buying letters—that’s just fraud.

Of course, one might reduce the likelihood of fraud by disclosing in the recommendation the details of one’s compensation. Would it be wrong if every letter began with the following? —

Dear Admissions Committee,

I should begin by disclosing that I was paid X% by FlyingEdu Hong Kong, an agent of the applicant, to write this recommendation and that this organization has read and approved of its content.

Providing sufficient disclosure of details of my relationship with the student and acknowledging my own potential bias should reduce or eliminate the fraud concern. I was spurred to learn more and just got off a zoom with a FlyingEdu representative who fleshed out their modus operandi. Recommenders are paid $800 per recommendation. The company sends the recommender the student’s materials including CV and transcripts. The recommender can review them and decide if they want to proceed with writing a recommendation letter for the student. If the recommender wants to proceed, they can speak with the student on zoom to get to know them better. The recommender can assign assignments or tests to the student to evaluate their abilities more objectively.

Crucially, the representative said that recommenders are allowed to be transparent in their recommendations and disclose details of their compensation. But the company reviews the recommendation letters. The representative said they would accept letters that include some negative assessments of the applicant. But they weren’t clear about if they share the recommendation letters with the students, or what they do if the company is not satisfied with the content of the recommendation.

I was told that the company currently works with about 50 recommenders from various universities in the United States and United Kingdom. The average recommender writes between 3 and 10 recommendations per month.

I am not going to go forward with this offer. But I find myself being more torn than I initially imagined. The fraud concern is largely handled with sufficient transparency. But I am more troubled by privileged parents buying access to elite institutions. Then again it is giving more institutional access to people from another country who have difficulty finding recommenders who will be heard. I might respond to this concern by opening myself to write recommendations gratis for less affluent applicants.

Would and should people think less of me if I fully disclosed that I was a paid advocate? That would be a strange reaction for a lawyer who believes paid advocacy is legitimate in other contexts.

The recommendation system is already compromised in many ways. As a recommender, am I acting as the agent of the applicant or of the recipient institution? I’d be more comfortable if my role were framed as an “evaluator” rather than an advocate. Part of me even wishes that recommendation databases could track how many times a recommender had described an applicant as the best they had ever seen.

At the end of the day, I worry that selling access to my evaluation services is misusing or diluting my institutions’ reputation.

Note to admission committees: if you come across a recommendation from a fancy professor who doesn’t have an obvious connection to the student, you might inquire whether the professor was paid for writing it.

https://open.substack.com/pub/ianayresinenglish/p/not-recommended?r=42a59&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web