I have been struck this week by the mistakes I have seen coming from certain schools. Mistakes that if a student made them would’ve resulted in some adult telling them that if they made those kinds of mistakes in the “real world” they’d be in major trouble. For example, Miami of Ohio just sent out a mailing naming the day of freshman move-in in a huge font. It was wrong. The University of Michigan housing department just posted pictures of what a specific dorm looks like. Only when apparently question by many people did they admit that furniture shown in the dorm room was not the actual kind of furniture in that dorm room. That mattered for the kind of planning that was the entire purpose of the picture. Never mind that Michigan told students that move in would be August 4 and fifth when as it turns out it’s August 3 and fourth.
Of course there has been not one meaningful apology from either school about these mistakes. I guess this is what really teaches our students how the real world works
The world is far from perfect and anytime human beings are involved in a process mistakes will be made. The better one learns to accept/deal with this, the happier one will be.
@soze. Is that what you think the lesson for students should be? “If you make a mistake others just better accept that mistakes happen, you certainly don’t need to do anything about it”?
I would like universities to show students how it’s done. 1) fully admit and apologize for the mistake. 2) make some effort to explain what happened and what steps will be taken to see that it doesn’t happen again. 3) to the extent possible do something to fix the mistake. These are the steps I would want my child to take. I don’t think it’s good to tell students that their mistakes are something other people just have to learn to deal with.
If these are the only kinds of administrative mistakes that happen to your kid in college, he/she will be lucky. I don’t understand being upset that a university used a picture of a different room in a housing flyer? All rooms will have basically the same furniture (bed, chair, desk, bookshelf) even if the details of the design vary. Re dates: if the university sent out an email correction to those affected and changed their website to reflect correct info, then that’s sufficient. Some admin in Housing or Res Life didn’t proofread. Someone got a black mark in the annual review. It’s not worth firing someone over unless it becomes a pattern. How much time do you honestly think the organization should spend beating its breast over this?
The more important mistakes are the ones the registrar or the bursar might make. Save your ire for those.
Unfortunately, mistakes are just something people have to deal with in life. Accepting this reality doesn’t mean that you are endorsing a sloppy careless attitude for yourself or your own student.
It seems OP’s mistake is bigger than UMich’s housing office.
Not only that. UMich’s move-in date actually varies with many factors (programs, clubs, school, etc). The official move-in dates are Sept 4 and 5. Indeed, my D has the move-in time slot on Sept 5. You think it is a mistake only because you saw a move-in date different from the general move-in date. They spread out the move-in dates for an obvious reason.
If someone purchased airfare based on a wrong, widely published move-in date, that would be a big mistake. No idea if that’s what happened here.
I do see OP’s point. Whether or not these mistakes caused any real problems, it’s just a good thing for an institution to set an example and apologize. A simple, “We are sorry for any confusion, please accept our apologies, here’s the correct date/correct room arrangement” etc. Is that so hard? Emotions and nerves run high this time of year; colleges know that.
No one should be fired. Hopefully nobody lost money. It’s not a great big deal. But I agree with OP that basic corporate manners are slipping more and more all the time, and we “sheeple” are being taught to just accept these things. Yet if YOU are a day late on some deadline for the college, there can be hell to pay.
After moving kids in and out and back and forth for almost a decade now I’m come to the realization that as long as they are settled before classes start all is good and the only important date is what date are the dorms open…after that especially at the big unis kids are moving in over a few days and the staggering is primarily so that everyone doesn’t show up at the same time.
When my wife and I entered my son’s eighth-grade rade English class for open house and saw that the teacher had written “Mr. Jone’s English Class” we knew it was not going to be a very good year. (His name wasn’t really “Jones,” but a another name ending in an “s”).
Everyone makes mistakes. I know I frequently do when posting things like this on the Internet. But my wife and I have been stunned at how often we have gotten things from a school or teacher that were just chock full of grammatical and spelling errors.
Marketing and Communications departments need better proofreaders for sure.
But it could be worse. MIT, CMU and Johns Hopkins all sent out “congratulations on being admitted” letters and emails to kids they meant to deny. Major no-no
“Never mind that Michigan told students that move in would be August 4 and fifth when as it turns out it’s August 3 and fourth.” August? Ah, no harm
;))
It wouldn’t surprise me if it were indeed students who made those mistakes, working for those universities in some capacity. Anyway, I guess I’ll get back to my reading on how Dewey Defeats Truman…
" But my wife and I have been stunned at how often we have gotten things from a school or teacher that were just chock full of grammatical and spelling errors. " A few errors like that will happen, especially if staff are over-worked or writing a quick update. If there are a lot of such errors, I’d conclude that the teacher is not well educated and has no business in the classroom. Of course I’ve seen a few errors in the school communications over the years, but nothing worthy of noting. Once, I received a printed “welcome letter” at the beginning of school from an experienced English teacher–the letter they send home on the first day with a few pages of general information about the class. This was obviously something she used every year on the first day of school, not a spontaneous email dashed off a few minutes before she ran out the door. It was very poorly written and shockingly full of errors. I told my kid, just be sure not to pick up any bad English from this teacher this year. That has only happened with one teacher, and so I have to think that your school has a lot of poorly trained teachers.
