Columbia University accidentally sent acceptance letters to 277 applicants
— -- An Ivy League university informed more than 200 students that they'd been accepted earlier this week, but it turned out to be a mistake.
Columbia University said it accidentally sent acceptance emails to 277 prospective students on Wednesday and then recalled them.
The university said the notices "incorrectly implied" that they'd been admitted to its Mailman School of Public Health Master's program. Columbia said it sent a follow-up email within an hour saying the initial notice was sent erroneously.
Columbia attributed the mix-up to "human error" and said it is working to strengthen its procedures.
"We deeply apologize for this miscommunication. We value the energy and enthusiasm that our applicants bring to the admissions process, and regret the stress and confusion caused by this mistake," Julie Kornfeld, Vice Dean for Education at Columbia University, told ABC News in a statement on Friday.
"We are working assiduously to strengthen our internal procedures in order to ensure that this mistake does not happen in the future," the statement continued.
The university did not immediately respond to ABC News' requests for additional information on what will happen to those students' applications.
Columbia is not the first university to make such a mistake.
In 2015, Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh said it mistakenly informed 800 applicants that they were accepted into their master’s program in computer science, the university said on its website.
And just last year, the University of Buffalo sent out 5,109 acceptance letters in error, according to CNN.
