Officials at the University of South Florida St. Petersburg (USFSP) said it recently sent 430 acceptance emails to student applicants by accident.
The university said the emails were delivered on Saturday, Jan. 19 and were a result of “human error”, according to a statement to ABC News.
An excerpt of one of the 430 emails sent to USFSP applicants by mistake“All of us work in higher education because we care about students, and we understand the confusion and distress a mistake like this can cause,” the St. Petersburg campus statement to ABC said. “As soon as we found out about the situation, we immediately reviewed our process for communicating with prospective students and have changed our procedures to prevent this from happening again.”
After the initial email was sent to the applicants, USFSP sent a follow-up email that said, “There was an error in the system. Please disregard the previous email.”
680 total emails were sent that day, 250 of which went to students that were accepted, said Carrie O’Brion, director of marketing and communications at USFSP.
“The remaining 430 received the acceptance email by mistake, either because their application was still under review, was incomplete or they were not selected for admission at this time,” O’Brion said. “We’re calling each student who received the acceptance mistakenly to update them on their status.”
