UC San Diego Admissions Faux Pas Rankles Rejected Students

Misdirected emails have been causing headaches inside the corporate sphere for many years, but combine an ill-timed email gaffe with anxious high school seniors waiting on college admissions offices, and you’ve got an unusual recipe for disaster. Unfortunately, that’s exactly what happened earlier this week when UC San Diego set emails welcoming its incoming freshman class to campus for a tour. Only instead of sending the email to just the 18,000 accepted students, an administrative staff member accessed the wrong database and sent the email to the 28,000 who had been rejected earlier this spring as well. Oops.

The email, which began, “We’re thrilled that you’ve been admitted to UC San Diego, and we’re showcasing our beautiful campus on Admit Day,” was rescinded in a matter of hours and an apology was issued–but not before causing a lot of confusion and disappointment among the students who thought their rejections had been overturned. Tracy Bettles, the mother of one of the students who received the email erroneously, told the LA Times, “It was really thrilling for a few hours; now he’s crushed. Unless you have a high school senior, or remember what it’s like, you don’t know. It’s really tough on them.”

Making a tough admissions season–which saw steep budgetary cutbacks and tight enrollment caps at many public universities–even tougher, the UC San Diego misstep is a very public reminder of the need for administrative discretion in higher education. According to the LA Times, schools such as Cornell, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Northwestern University have made similar blunders in the past, but UC San Diego’s is the largest.

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