University to applicants: You're in...no, you're out

Imagine getting accepted into the college of your dreams.

Imagine, however, that after you bragged to all your friends and family about your acceptance that you learned it was all a horrible mistake.

That's what happened this week to 800 students who applied to a prestigious graduate computer science program at Carnegie Mellon University. The computer science graduate school at the Pittsburgh institution, in the opinion of U.S. News & World Report, is tied with MIT, Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley, as the best in the country.

Carnegie Mellon gave the 800 applicants just enough time to celebrate when the acceptances arrived on Monday before rescinding the offers on Tuesday.

We understand the disappointment created by this mistake and deeply apologize to applicants for this miscommunication," Kenneth Walters, Carnegie Mellon's spokesman, was quoted as saying. The school said it would be conducting an investigation after explaining that the system had "incorrectly flagged" the applicants as being admitted.

Oops, never mind!

What happened at Carnegie Mellon is hardly a fluke. Every year, the exhilaration that accepted college applicants experience is shattered hours or days later when some colleges and universities send follow-up emails that essentially say, "Oops, never mind."

Schools that have whipsawed students with incorrect acceptance letters in recent years include MIT, Fordham, Johns Hopkins, George Washington University, Vassar, UCLA and Vanderbilt.

It's doubtful that any school has crushed the dreams of more applicants than the University of California, San Diego, which sent out erroneous acceptance letters in 2009 to 28,000 students.

When the University of California, Davis, sent out mistaken acceptance letters, it decided to correct the errors on April Fool's Day. April 1 was also the date that New York University dispatched emails to applicants announcing their acceptance to the graduate school of public service before retracting those acceptances about an hour later.

So why do these snafus happen every year?

College administrators lay much of the blame on technology. With the college admission process computerized, it's easy to make an embarrassing mistake by hitting a few computer keys. Contrast that to the days when admission staffers faced the laborious job of writing acceptance letters and then mailing them. With snail mail, it would be difficult to make such large-scale mistakes.

So what should students do? Here's an idea: Instead of celebrating, consider waiting a day or two before broadcasting the big news. After all, nobody wants to be the victim of fake news.