Apparently some colleges can’t even get it right when it comes to acceptance letters:
Applicants to Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health were the latest anxiety-ridden group of young people to fall victim to an admissions glitch, when, in February 2017, the school accidentally sent offers of admission to 277 students then said the notices were sent in error about an hour later. But those students are just the latest in a string of others who have suffered the same fate. Schools ranging from Carnegie Mellon to Tulane have sent admissions notices in error. In 2009, the University of California-San Diego accidentally told 28,000 students they were admitted to the school, when in fact they were rejected.
Of course, the response from these blundering fools is of the “My bad!” shrugs, along with the inexcusable excuses:
The errors are likely the result of the most mundane of office problems: IT challenges.
“For some places you’re taking relatively young professionals, you’re putting them in roles where they don’t have an enormous amount of experience with business process,” Farrell said. “The other piece is that sometimes the systems on campus, the enterprise management systems, can be very complex and not terribly user-friendly.”
I’m sorry, but we as a society are way past the “Oh, the computer got it wrong” bullshit. I’m not a litigious kind of person, but this looks like a classic case of a huge class-action “pain and suffering” payout. Without some kind of financial penalty, the universities (all of whom include courses on “Computer Science” in their curricula) have absolutely no incentive to fix this situation. So the “complex, unfriendly enterprise management systems” won’t get fixed, nor will the “inexperienced young professionals” get fired; and prospective (fee-paying) students will continue to get shafted. (My suggestion: every time a person gets a false acceptance letter, that student should be entitled to a full-boat, all-expenses-paid four-year scholarship at the offending college. That, I think, would get someone’s attention.)
All in all, however, this sorry experience will also provide school-leavers with an excellent foretaste of corporate indifference and inefficiency, an experience that should stand them in good stead in their future careers. When their lives can be fucked up by a “mail-merge” mistake, young people will see at firsthand just how unimportant they are to Global MegaCorp Inc. If that doesn’t melt the “snowflake” mentality, nothing will.
Nitwits at so-called institutions of higher learning. When I worked for a university, I administered scholarships and job applications. Yes, these were only in the hundreds, not thousands, but the same MO applies. I made a column in my lists that said yes or no on whether an applicant was approved or not. I made several copies of the master list and then sorted by No and Yes, then deleted the appropriate rows for accepted or not accepted. Now I had a list of Nos and a separate list of Yes–each clearly labelled as such.The Nos got rejections letters via mail merge. The Yes people got notice of awards via email. There was never an issue of sending the wrong letter out. How hard can it be if you pay attention to what you are doing? It’s what you are getting paid to do.