The BusinessWeek online discussion forum was buzzing yesterday with reports of anxious Kellogg applicants receiving congratulatory letters from the Kellogg assistant dean of admissions saying they’d been admitted to the class of 2009, only to find that their online status showed they’d been denied. Uh oh.
The BW thread reveals references to at least four such situations. One of the affected applicants, santurian, shared this post:
“Yes the same thing has happened with 3 other guys on GMATClub. We all got the mail from the Asst. Dean congratulating
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Congratulations! I am pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management MBA Two-Year Class of 2011.
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The status message on the online system is:
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The Admissions Committee has completed its review of your application for the Two-Year Program at the Kellogg School of Management. Despite your many merits as a candidate, I regret to inform you that we are not able to offer you a place in the entering class.”
Beyond the discussion in the BW online forum, our own checks with prospective applicants in the pool turned up two similar stories. The applicants received a congratulatory email only to find that their online status reflected that they’d been denied. In later conversations with Kellogg Director of Admissions Beth Flye, both learned that they had, in fact, been denied. Kellogg told one of these applicants that it would refund the application fee and give the candidate an opportunity to review the application with an admissions counselor.
In an article this morning, the Chicago Tribune confirmed the reports. According to the Tribune, about 50 applicants in total received an email saying they’d been admitted when they actually had been denied. Northwestern attributed the error to a “technological glitch” isolated to Kellogg.
“It was not human error,” Kellogg spokesperson Meg Washburn told the Tribune. “It has never happened before. Our systems have been in place for years. We have never experienced a problem.”
Admissions Director Beth Flye began calling each of the affected applicants on Tuesday to inform them of the error, according to Washburn. She confirmed to the Tribune that Kellogg plans to refund the $235 application fee to each of the mis-accepted students.
While unfortunate, this admissions upset is not unprecedented. From a technology standpoint, there have been two well-documented system glitches, the most noteworthy taking place at Harvard Business School in 2005 and a smaller incident in 2007 where all Georgetown McDonough applicants received a letter indicating that they’d been waitlisted.
