An Ivy League school accidentally sent congratulatory emails to 277 prospective students on Wednesday at the Mailman School of Public Health, before informing the aspiring students that it was actually a mistake.
Columbia University said it made a mistake of sending these acceptance letters and recalled them, ABC News reported. They said that in the emails of the applicants, it was incorrectly implied that they have been accepted and follow up messages to recall the mistake were sent within an hour.
The university attributed the mistake to human error and also committed to work on improving and strengthening its procedures, and that they regret the confusion that the mistake has caused, according to Daily News New York.
Julie Kornfeld, Vice Dean for Education said that the university would make sure they establish procedures that will ensure prevention of the same event or mistake. She said that they deeply apologize for the miscommunication and they value the energy and enthusiasm that the applicants bring to the admissions process.
It was not entirely clear if those 277 potential students who received the messages were in a certain category among those who applied to Mailman.
This is also not the first time that a mix up like this happened. In 2015, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh also made a mistake of informing 800 applicants by mistake that they were accepted into their master's program in computer science.
There was another large mix up that happened in 2009. University of California, San Diego has sent out acceptance emails to all of the applicants. There was a total of 46,000 students who received the emails, and even the 28,000 who were rejected got the same notification.
