<p>This year, thousands of hardworking high school students’ dreams of an Ivy League education will be shattered due to a miniscule error made while filling out their applications. That error? Applying to the wrong university.</p>
<p>In recent years, new colleges with names similar – or even exactly the same – as those of some of America’s most prestigious universities have been popping up all over the place. Schools such as Wisconsin’s Yale Undergraduate Community College, Florida’s Columbia State University and South Carolina’s Cornall University have been recieving piles of applications from exceptionally talented and exceptionally befuddled students.</p>
<p>“When I got the huge acceptance packet from Brown, I was totally psyched,” recants Parker Fields, a pupil at The Gregory Pitcher Magnet School in New York City. “I only found out it wasn’t legit after a friend of mine pointed out the difference on the bumper stickers the schools had sent to us.” Mr. Fields goes on to tell about the response he recieved when he contacted Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island about his error. “The lady said she was really sorry,” he reports, and through his smile a slight tone of bitterness can be detected. “She said I was the third call she had recieved from a person in my situation, and that there was really nothing she could do. In the end, she promised that if I reapplied next year as a transfer student, the admission’s office would be sure to take my circumstances into consideration.”</p>
<p>Misled high school students aren’t alone in their dismay.</p>
<p>“This sort of thing has been going on for a while,” reports Tina Witherson, an admission’s officer at Brown University located in Providence, Rhode Island. “Two years ago the valedictorian at my daughter’s high school was utterly heartbroken when she realized that she had been accepted to Standford University in West Virginia rather than Stanford University [a private and highly prestigious school] in California’s Palo Alto. What makes me really angry about the whole thing is that the two universities’ acceptance packets really resemble one another, and the poor girl didn’t even discover her mistake until a teacher pointed it out to her! To me, it seems as if this Standford and similar schools are trying to trick these deserving and truly hardworking kids into matriculating at the wrong institution.”</p>
<p>Mrs. Witherson isn’t alone in feeling that this university trickery is unjust. “My son is so embarrassed that I can’t even get him out of bed to go to school in the morning anymore. Before this happened to him, he was an excellent and involved student,” recants Marry Fling, a slightly heavy, harassed-looking woman standing outside the admissions office of Havard College in Houston, Texas. She is just one among a sizable group of protestors standing in the mid-day heat for which the city is so well-known. “And it’s not just him,” admits Mrs. Fling, “I had been bragging to all of my colleagues at work. My husband and I had been planning a party! Now what am I supposed to tell everyone?” As tears begin to swell in the humiliated woman’s eyes, she goes on to explain her reasons for coming all the way from her home in Alaska to be among the protestors. “It’s not just an unfortunate coincidence. This is purposeful misrepresentation. I feel sure that if enough people know what these impostor schools are doing, then places like Havard will be compelled to change their names.”</p>
<p>When asked, admissions officers at Havard University declined to comment, but at a press conference on Thursday, a representative from Cornall University insisted that no harm was meant by the dubbing of the university. “No matter how you look at it, the names just aren’t the same,” asserted the representative, “My associates and I agree that one would have to be quite foolish to apply to Cornall by accident.”</p>
None of these sound-alikes have websites (though there is a Cornell College in Iowa - it was there first). Was this from The Onion or in the April Fools edition of a campus newspaper?</p>