About 2,500 high school students were mistakenly told they were accepted to Fordham University in New York this week, the New York Times reported.

Early decision applicants received financial aid letters on Wednesday - two days before students were told to expect a decision - informing them they'd been accepted admitted into the Jesuit, private school which has two campus locations: The Bronx and New York City.

"I was confused, but I was happy," Blayr Davis, a senior at Walnut High School in Walnut, Calif., told The Times. "I was excited. It was cool."

A few hours after early admission, applicants received the letters from a third-party contractor congratulating them, Fordham University told students that the notices had been sent in error and did not reflect their acceptance status.

Students also logged into Fordham University's Website to learn whether or not they had been admitted, The Times reported.

A spokesman for Fordham University told The Times that one fifth of the applicants who had received the email - about 500 students - had actually been rejected from the school, while the other 2,000 were deferred and would find out their final status in spring 2014.

The school released a statement on Thursday apologizing for the mistake and said it was working with the contractor, Student Aid Services, to determine what happened.

"Fordham and its undergraduate admissions staff are acutely aware of the high hopes prospective students and their families have regarding college acceptances," the school said in a statement to the Times. "The University deeply regrets that some applicants were misled by the financial aid notice. The admission staff is working with [Student Aid Services] to find out what went wrong."

Mary Fallon, a spokeswoman for Student Aid Services, told the Times that the error was the first of its kind for the company and "occurred when data was transferred from a staging environment to our development environment."

Fordham University said it was unclear how the email was sent out, but said that they had placed extra staff members on duty to handle applicants' questions.