Law Schools, Screw-Ups

Congrats, You Got Into Yale Law School! Oh Wait....

Sucks to be these people.

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yale law schoolYou just finished your first year of law school with flying colors, and you’re applying to transfer to even more august institutions. You’ve applied to all the usual suspects, including Harvard and Stanford, but your heart is set on Yale — the #1 law school in the country, according to both the U.S. News and Above the Law rankings.

One fine day in July, you get an email in your inbox bringing joyous news: you’ve been admitted to Yale Law School! With a generous financial aid offer to boot! You promptly go out to a local bar to celebrate, basking in the congratulations and buying drinks for all your friends.

A few hours later, after leaving the bar and sobering up, you receive this message:

Yale Law School erroneous acceptance letter

Now you want to puke. And it’s not because of all the Natty Lights you just put away….

In fairness to Yale, this isn’t the first time we’ve covered a law school that erroneously admitted people. But having a coveted acceptance to Yale Law get pulled is very different from being told sorry, you didn’t get into Touro Law (which, by the way, you didn’t even apply to).

We reached out to Yale about the snafu, including a copy of the message received by the ill-fated applicants. YLS issued this explanation through a spokesperson:

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Unfortunately, the attached message from our former Financial Aid director describes what happened.

Since transfer applicants have such a tight timeframe in which to make their decision, our Financial Aid office prepared a handful of financial aid award letters ahead of time for candidates who had submitted their need access and FAFSA information, so that in the event they were admitted, these awards could be sent immediately and the candidates could make their decision with complete information about their financial situation. Unfortunately, a few of those financial aid letters were sent out prematurely, before final decisions had been reached by the Admissions committee.

We found out what happened within a couple of hours, and immediately reached out to the affected applicants.

We are extremely sorry about what happened, during what we know is a very stressful time for applicants, and we have apologized to those individuals who received these award letters.

And that’s really all that one can do — own up to the mistake, and apologize profusely.

On a happier note, the error affected just a handful of applicants — ten, to be exact. It still sucks to be one of those ten, but at least we’re not talking about the 17,572 people who got the Touro email.

And one has to think that transfer applicants who came thisclose to getting into Yale got admitted to several other top law schools — or are already kicking butt and taking names at their current law schools. Condolences to them on not getting into Yale, but good luck in what will surely be stellar legal careers.

Earlier: Confessions of an Aspiring Yale Transfer Student
Law School Sends Acceptance Letters To People Who Never Even Applied

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David Lat is the founder and managing editor of Above the Law and the author of Supreme Ambitions: A Novel. You can connect with David on Twitter (@DavidLat), LinkedIn, and Facebook, and you can reach him by email at [email protected].

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