Dive Brief:

• Carnegie Mellon University on Monday mistakenly sent an acceptance email to about 800 computer science master's degree applicants.
• The email congratulated each recipient as “one of the select few,” considering that less than 9% of more than 1,200 applicants were accepted.
• The university apologized about seven hours later, and blamed “serious mistakes in our process for generating acceptance letters.”

Dive Insight:

The original email included “bragging points” for the soon-to-be-very-disappointed recipients to use when describing how wonderful the university is. According to a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article, the would-be Carnegie Mellon students probably wouldn’t have a case if they tried to sue. High-profile acceptance letter snafus have also occurred recently at Johns Hopkins and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Considering that there are 4,500 institutions, the mistaken acceptance notification rate isn’t that high. According to the National Association for College Admission Counseling, a small number of such mistakes are inevitable, regardless of safeguards.