<p>At least 3 universities have done something like this this spring. Colleges need to create a better system.</p>
<p>"NEW YORK - New York University officials weren’t laughing when hundreds of people mistakenly received word that they’d been accepted to grad school on April Fools’ Day.</p>
<p>NYU says it sent out acceptance e-mails April 1 to 489 applicants to the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. Those applicants should have received rejection letters instead.</p>
<p>This happened two years ago when my daughter applied to UNC. She was not accepted; fortunately she was not one of the ones who was rejected and then received an acceptance notice by mistake. Ouch!</p>
<p>There should be some consequence as hard as these admissions offices are on kids who send the wrong papers or make such mistakes. They love to talk about how careless the applicants are and they are 18 year old kids. Amateurs. The Admissions officers are professionals. They should be held accountable for these mistakes.</p>
<p>Except that there are only so many spots – dorm rooms, classrooms, faculty members, etc. The on-campus resources are finite. And that’s not even taking into account the qualifications of those denied. If I were an admitted student, I’d be more than a little ticked that my double turned into a quad and that my 30 person class turned into a 60 person one, all because of a careless technological mistake.</p>
<p>Cpt and NSM are dead on: these admissions offices need to be more meticulous with something as important as this.</p>
<p>The schools should resume sending just the fat envelope and the thin envelope and then they wouldn’t have this problem! (I know it is costly but…) Look at UCSD! It is painful enough to get rejected once but twice is even worse.</p>
<p>The ironic thing is that NYU admissions for undergrad ONLY sends their decisions by snail mail, no email. Applicants complain EVERY year about that!</p>
<p>I agree that it is painful and that schools should do everything possible to avoid these errors, but I don’t think there is any way to hold the tech people “accountable”-- These are errors, not deliberate acts of malice and there simply isn’t any way to offer admission to all who receive the erroneous emails.</p>
<p>Didn’t a California college just do this too???</p>
<p>Considering how much stuff NYU sends to undergrads in the admissions phase, they could cut back on that an buy some stamps to send out a real people of paper to people they are rejecting. I guess that would cost less than $250 to send 489 envelopes.</p>
<p>Possibly so, but that offer would have to be accepted before the notification went out that it was withdrawn. So only those who were very quick to respond to the email and send in their deposit would be able to lay claim to their “offered” spot.</p>