On Tuesday morning, University of Carolina at San Diego’s administrative office accidentally sent out congratulatory emails to 28,000 students who were denied admission last month.
The message congratulated the recipients and invited them to “Admit Day,” an event for new students and their families.
Admissions Director Mae Brown said that this was an “administrative error,” according to the Los Angeles Times. Someone at the office accidentally chose the wrong database and ended up sending the email to all 47,000 applicants for Fall 2009, instead of the 18,000 that were accepted.
“I take full responsibility,” said Brown, who reportedly stayed at the office until midnight to write an apology letter, to theTimes.
The letter is posted on the school’s Web site. In it, Brown said that a follow-up email to correct the mistake was sent out within two hours. She also wrote that the school “sincerely regret[s] the confusion and distress our non-admitted applicants and their families may have experienced as a result of this error.”
“It was never our intent to cause further disappointment during an already stressful admissions process for high school seniors.”
Brown said that she and her staff have spent the day answering complaints and questions from disappointed parents and students.
“It was a shock,” said one parent, who wished to remain anonymous, told the Times. The parent also remarked to the paper that this was a “colossal screw-up” and that his family was going to attend Admit Day before he learned that the email was bogus.
Cornell University, the University of California at Davis, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management have also had similar technological mistakes in the past. However, none of those University’s blunders were on as large of a scale as UCSD’s.
Our Take:
I cannot imagine the confusion and probably the anger that a lot of students and parents feel when all of this happened. If this happened to me, I would be furious because I would feel “played” in a sense. The downside to modern technology is that sometimes it is unreliable. That is pretty much inevitable.
How fitting that this happened right before April Fools day.
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