1,500 Georgia State University applicants got acceptance emails. It was a mistake

By Sydney Bishop, CNN

(CNN) — Congratulations seemed in order for roughly 1,500 undergraduate applicants to Georgia State University.

Over 1,000 applicants received a “welcome” email for the 2024-25 school year – before discovering their new status was the result of an error by the school’s admissions office.

“The email to the prospective students wasn’t an official acceptance letter, it was one of several communications sent to accepted students after they are admitted,” Andrea Jones, vice president of public relations for the school, told CNN in a statement Monday.

“This particular group of 1,500 had incomplete applications,” said Jones.

“We sent them follow up communication explaining the error and encouraging them to complete their applications so they could be considered for admission.”

The admissions office received “about 10 inquiries (regarding) this erroneous communication,” Jones said.

One of the disappointed applicants was stunned by the news that she had not been accepted to GSU, her mother told CNN affiliate WSB-TV, which first reported the story.

“She really won’t talk about it. She wouldn’t come out of her room all day. She’s just very disappointed,” Vanessa Peters said.

Peters’ daughter later received an acceptance letter from the university to Perimeter College, a two-year college within Georgia State, her mother told CNN.

Georgia State University – whose main campus is in downtown Atlanta – will now be “triple-checking” to ensure the situation is not repeated, it said.

Other schools have had similar miscues in the past.

In February, the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine sent out acceptance emails to 44 students supposed to be placed on the waitlist, the school’s student newspaper reported.

Northeastern University in Boston has made a similar mistake, twice. Most recently in December 2023, 48 applicants for master’s degree programs were sent an erroneous acceptance email, the Boston Globe reported.

The year before, 3,930 former and 205 current law school applicants were accepted to Northeastern’s law school by mistake.

But the decisions had not yet been finalized. The law school “quickly sent a clarifying email explaining the error,” according to a statement shared with CNN from the university.

CNN’s Zoe Sottile contributed to this report.

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