<p>I agree that they should accept the 76 students. starbright gives multiple good reasons in the final paragraph of #40. </p>
<p>UNC Chapel Hill had a similar situation in 2007, when they mistakenly sent out admissions emails–maybe just to out-of-state students. They may have just been premature, rather than erroneous, though. Can’t tell from here.</p>
<p>It is not the box itself that’s expensive, it is maintaining the environment (resource) to make sure the code and data are all in sync which makes it expensive. </p>
<p>What I have observed is that those colleges use one environment to do everything. Few years back, when D1 was getting her notifications, there was one college that were uploading their accepted students’ ID & PW as they were modifying their acceptance letter. I found out by accident (from previous year’s URL). I just tried with D1’s ID&PW, and was able to to get on the site, out popped “Congratulations,” except the it had previous year’s dates.</p>
<p>Again, in my opinion, that’s the cost of doing business… simply sloppy and unprofessional not to maintain three environments in my opinion. </p>
<p>Getting back to the question at hand, I think admissions, once they blew it, had a responsibility to do more than simply hide behind an answering machine - talk to us on Monday is not acceptable in my mind. I would have sent the same letter - and followed up with an apology via telephone. - 76 applicants given the incorrect information, 10 people on staff - call it 8 phone calls each. </p>
<p>Given that the error was caught in just a few hours, I don’t think that these applicants should have been given automatic admission. It is unlikely that their chances of admission elsewhere were harmed. I would give them an edge if they had been deferred to the regular pool.</p>
<p>Wow, I feel just terrible for the affected students. It was ED 2, and any other RD applications would have already been sent, so at least it didn’t stop them from applying to other schools. I hope nobody had actually withdrawn their other applications yet. </p>
<p>When my S was accepted to his ED school, I couldn’t quite believe it, and had the fear that it was a mistake, since I had heard of other mistakes. He wanted to withdraw his other apps within the first half hour of finding out, but I told him to wait until he got the actual written acceptance letter. So, I guess this is a cautionary tale, to not be too quick to withdraw your other applications.</p>
<p>As an IT person, if you need to test in the environment make sure your letter indicates it is a test. We always use gibberish to test to prevent this kind of mistake</p>
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<p>Good thinking!</p>
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<p>Inasmuch as the admissions staff had to know how much heartbreak (albeit transitory heartbreak, one hopes) they had likely caused, that would definitely have been the honorable way to handle follow up.</p>
<p>Couldn’t even imagine how it must have felt like to get accepted into your dream school only to realize it was a misunderstanding. It would be ignorant to say that the kids affected by this aren’t a bit scarred after that. And for the Vassar admissions to brush it off as not a big deal is unacceptable.</p>
<p>I disagree. Vassar should not admit those students simply because Vassar accidentally sent them an acceptance letter instead of a rejection letter. While certainly unfortunate that those students experience a monumental letdown, they don’t deserve to be admitted because of a technical mistake by Vassar. They were already rejected because Vassar didn’t consider them to be a good “fit” for the school and they weren’t impressive enough. Those 76 students don’t deserve a place in the class because of a mistake and not on their own merit.</p>
<p>So, 254 applied ED, 46 were REALLY accepted and 76 were mistakenly accepted. Does this mean that those 76 were supposed to be deferred? (since there is an unaccounted number of 132 that were perhaps rejected outright??)</p>
<p>It’s a horrible mistake, and unfortunately in this age, we share good and bad news instantly via FB, twitter etc. So yes, besides the elation that quickly turns to dejection, there is the embarrassment. </p>
<p>Fortunately this was ED II, everyone should have applied to a whole bunch of RD schools already, and I cannot imagine that in the 1 hour that Vassar took to correct it, students were already withdrawing applications.</p>
<p>It’s likely that few of the students suffered any irreparable harm other than hurt feelings. But if a kid in this situation had withdrawn his RD applications, while it’s true that the other schools would probably reinstate them, under the circumstances–those other schools would know that he had been rejected from Vassar. It’s impossible to say what impact that might have on those schools’ admissions decisions.</p>
<p>I think Vassar should send a check for $500 to each of the 76 kids.</p>
<p>Perhaps this would be a good time for schools to discontinue sending out electronic acceptances/denials for ED’s. Yeah, it would be nice to know the decisions at the second they are released, but slowing things down in this case might make for fewer “tiny” errors on the IT side that go on and wreak havoc on a much larger scale. There is so much riding on the ED decision for the students; they are supposed to unconditionally commit to said institution by withdrawing from all others after accepting, but the schools, it seems, can do as they please, covering themselves with a mere “Oopsie! my bad! Have a nice life!”. </p>
<p>This would be a good time for high school guidance counselors to start telling their juniors and seniors to let some minimum period of time pass, say three or five business days, before withdrawing all their other applications after getting an ED acceptance decision in order to protect themselves. And it would be nice if schools with ED options would be forced, through some negative consequence, to be more proactive in checking their work before shipping it out: say, if they don’t send out the corrected notifications within a certain reasonable time window they will be forced to admit those students. At the very least they should remit the application fees back to those students as a small compensation for wasting their time and getting their hopes up.</p>
<p>Only entities that feel they are holding all the cards can be brash enough to tell their victims to suck it up and go away. The schools already have their non-refundable application money, they are sitting on a product that is in high demand, no lack of customers who are eager to fork over a small fortune for it, and hurrah, there is no downside (save, perhaps, temporary embarrassment) in making these kinds of errors.</p>
<p>When my supermarket accidently marks food items with a price that is lower than the actual price, they are obligated to give you the marked price. Just sayin.’</p>
<p>If Vassar corrected the, er, problem within an hour, I would say they didn’t have a chance to really think through their solution before acting. And I wonder if a student could make the claim that the first letter legally binds the college. </p>
<p>Might have been an interesting experiment to not tell the 76 kids anything, allow them to attend, and then follow them closely over the 4 years to see the success rate. </p>
<p>Poor kids. My heart goes out to them.</p>
<p>I believe schools have sent letters with inaccurate info. So I do not believe that going back to snail mail for notification is the answer. </p>
<p>Hopefully, this is a very rare occurance, and the students are admitted to an even better fit for them. I would like to say “that everything happens for a reason”, but honestly, I think this falls into the “sometimes things just suck” category. </p>
<p>I feel bad for the students, I really do think that Vasser should try to find a way to work with the students that still would like to be there. I am not sure that a $500 check would make much of a difference to those that really wanted to attend.</p>
<p>Chocoholic: gut feel tells me that the 132 were the deferral and the 76 were the “supposed to be” rejections?..not the other way around; but I could be wrong…</p>
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To draw an analogy, what if someone were wrongly informed that he won the lottery? Sure, it sucks, but are you really going to give him the money over the person who really did win?</p>
<p>The difference between that scenario and what happened at Vassar is that there are some objective criteria in the college admissions process and it is not just luck, even if holistic admissions does largely seem to be a crapshoot.</p>
<p>It’s absolutely unfortunate that anyone had to go through believing that they were accepted to a dream school only to be rejected, but accepting them is not a reasonable solution. As someone else said, you aren’t entitled to attend a school because someone else made a mistake. I do agree that adcoms should’ve stuck around to man the office/make some phone calls, and it would obviously be ideal if the problem didn’t happen in the first place.</p>
<p>(I also don’t understand why the word “cavalier” is being tossed around so liberally - everything I have read looks genuinely regretful, but I guess if acceptances or app fees aren’t passed out to everyone they are “cavalier.”)</p>
<p>Deferring them all to RD, unfortunately, would not make sense either. Vassar rejected them as binding EDII candidates. In the regular pool there is less incentive to accept them. It’d only damage their yield.</p>
<p>I believe that the 76 were only the ones who were rejected and checked their decisions between 4 and 5 or whenever it was corrected. The other 132 were probably rejected but didn’t get to check it immediately.</p>
<p>^ Exactly. And paying them $500 won’t do anything either, nor would offering a refund for the application fee. Even without the mistake, those applicants are ultimately rejected. Why should Vassar pay them? Because their feelings were hurt even though they were going to be rejected anyway?</p>
<p>Did anyone else hear (on NPR) or read about the author who was told she won a National Book Award for her young adult novel Shine only to learn that the actual winner was a book called Chime? The author, Lauren Myracle, responded graciously, but did ask the National Book Foundation to make a donation to a charity relevant to the subject of her book. I don’t know if there’s an equivalent gesture Vassar could make. Maybe in time the school will come up with something appropriate. Certainly, a phone call to each of the disappointed hopefuls, as one poster suggested, would not be too much to ask, IMO. That probably wouldn’t make anyone feel better, but it’s more courageous than telling people to call during normal business hours! Maybe they’d vent. So let 'em! They have every right to be indignant.</p>
<p>What if they did take them in… and track them over their college careers. I would hazard a guess that 4 years later they would be virtually indistinguishable from the students that were not accidentally accepted. My #1 son was rejected from his ED school outright. 4 years later he graduated, having done perfectly well, from a school that was highly comparable on all accounts. </p>
<p>It is not that Vassar owes them anything, except an apology I think, and heck- why not refund their application fees for good measure. But, it might prove how subjective and random admissions decisions are in some cases.</p>
<p>^
Awesome idea for a documentary!</p>
<p>My best friend got a deposit of over $1 million in her account by mistake. She promptly asked the bank to get it out of her acct as soon as possible, and the bank didn’t believe they could possibly make such a mistake. It took them few weeks to straighten it out, but she was left with dealing with the IRS on the interest income. My friend was very disappointed with not getting the money, and I am sure the teller was very sorry she made a typo, but I think most people here would say it would be wrong to give my friend the money.</p>