Author: Gil Alcaraz
This past April Fool’s day, University of California San Diego was truly in the holiday spirit. Earlier this month, 18,000 students had learned that they had been accepted to attend UCSD in the fall of ’09, while 29,000 were regretfully declined acceptance. These 29,000 downtrodden high school seniors awoke to a rather joyous email on April 1st, as UCSD had mistakenly sent out acceptance emails to all 47,000 accepted as well as declined applicants.
Due to an “administrative error,” as the school has called it, these excited seniors went straight to scheduling flights and other means of transportation to attend the Admit Day, which all recipients were invited to in the email. Approximately two hours later, however, these 29,000 students received another email telling them that they had received the wrong email and they were not, in fact, accepted into UCSD. This, of all years, was not a good year for such an event to occur, as there has recently been a UC-wide enrollment cap due to the economic instability which forced UCSD to drop its enrollment by 520 students.Students as well as parents were outraged at this seemingly careless mistake that dashed thousands of high school seniors’ hopes of being able to head to San Diego this upcoming fall. Many students were quoted as feeling as though they were rejected again. I can’t even imagine my feelings of discontent if I were to have been denied from my top choice, then accepted, then declined again.
When asked about the situation, UCSD’s Admissions Director Mae Brown responded, saying that the admissions staff simply “accessed the wrong database” and that “it was not our intent.” Regardless of intent, I think I speak for all of the parents and students who were affected by this when I say that this was a completely screwed up situation that could have easily been avoided.
This same type of situation has occurred previously at schools such as Cornell, University of North Carolina, and Northwestern University, although none have ever been on this big of scale as with UCSD. This brings about the question of whether making the application process almost completely electronic is really worth the mistakes that occur.
When application time comes around for high school seniors, many of their lives seem to hang in the balance as they eagerly await acceptance letters from their favorite colleges. And yet, it’s almost as if every day each college that has your name on their emailing list sends you the same generalized e-mail in hopes of further elevating your interest in their school, flooding e-mail boxes nation-wide. There hardly seems to be a relevant use of sending similar information on a daily basis to someone who obviously already knows about your school and who most likely has already done a significant amount of research themselves.
This process of generalized e-mails going out to an entire pool of applicants which can number in the tens of thousands, seems to be pretty informal and impersonal. And as we’ve seen, it can often lead to some pretty severe mistakes. All it takes is a wrong click of the mouse or too much carelessness, to send 29,000 stressed out high school students into a frenzy, as well as one more to shoot down their hopes and dreams shortly after.
Brown, as well as associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers Barmak Nassarian both agree however, that even though mistakes do occur, electronic communications are extremely efficient and that students have become more comfortable with such a process. Should this efficiency come at the cost of the sanity of 29,000 hormonal high school seniors?
As simplicity and efficiency become more and more of a main goal in our society, only time will tell just how much personal interaction as well as sensitivity towards those being communicated with will suffer. The electronic age is among us and society may not be ready for what lies ahead.
Gil Alcaraz is an undeclared first-year. He can be reached at galcaraz@oxy.edu.
This article has been archived, for more requests please contact us via the support system.
