Tulane email snafu

[lurker123]

GN69, we can probably do a little better than FEMA. For the several years when Loyola was renovating the Dominican campus dorm next to current Loyola Law School, it leased dorms from UNO and bussed students across town to Loyola campus. How much would any of us have liked two years of that?

Nonetheless with the dramatic post-Katrina decline in UNO enrollment, I guess those rooms are still unoccupied and just waiting for some Tulane frosh???!!!!

[golfnut69]

GN69, we can probably do a little better than FEMA. For the several years when Loyola was renovating the Dominican campus dorm next to current Loyola Law School, it leased dorms from UNO and bussed students across town to Loyola campus. How much would any of us have liked two years of that?

Nonetheless with the dramatic post-Katrina decline in UNO enrollment, I guess those rooms are still unoccupied and just waiting for some Tulane frosh???!!!!

...
That would work for me....I was actually hoping to park the FEMA trailers in front of Scott and Marge's house, if the property on Jeff Hwy could not be used

[winwave]

Again folks, these were "acceptance" letters. No college not even Harvard or Stanford much less Tulane gets 100% yield even on early admit offers which both parties ("morally?") commit to be binding. So we should be cautious in throwing 130 around as the determinative number of new students.

The sports analogy would be football recruits jilting us after receiving last minute P5 offers. Or perhaps WF's recruiting last year when he had more than a few recruits accept his offer and jilt other schools. It's Darwinian whether right or not.

So perhaps we're speaking about 40 to 75 "extra" students here (at max but just my SWAG.)

Lots of students in these cases walk away as late as the last second including foregoing non-refundable deposits.

Tulane is more sensitive because its freshman yield last year was unexpectedly high and it did not have enough dorm rooms on campus so more than a few frosh students were tripling up. It does not want a repeat of that.

Obviously there is no easy way to clean this mistake up and we are understandably concerned about university's brand and reputation. I don't have a preference on how to fix it; just want a little more precision and context around its parameters.

From reading about this these were Early Decision students meaning they could only choose to apply thru that process to one school and if accepted agreed to go there. So it would be all 130.

[lurker123]

Again folks, these were "acceptance" letters. No college not even Harvard or Stanford much less Tulane gets 100% yield even on early admit offers which both parties ("morally?") commit to be binding. So we should be cautious in throwing 130 around as the determinative number of new students.

The sports analogy would be football recruits jilting us after receiving last minute P5 offers. Or perhaps WF's recruiting last year when he had more than a few recruits accept his offer and jilt other schools. It's Darwinian whether right or not.

So perhaps we're speaking about 40 to 75 "extra" students here (at max but just my SWAG.)

Lots of students in these cases walk away as late as the last second including foregoing non-refundable deposits.

Tulane is more sensitive because its freshman yield last year was unexpectedly high and it did not have enough dorm rooms on campus so more than a few frosh students were tripling up. It does not want a repeat of that.

Obviously there is no easy way to clean this mistake up and we are understandably concerned about university's brand and reputation. I don't have a preference on how to fix it; just want a little more precision and context around its parameters.

From reading about this these were Early Decision students meaning they could only choose to apply thru that process to one school and if accepted agreed to go there. So it would be all 130.

Not true. You don't get 100% yield on acceptance letters on anything in college admissions in any aspect in any program at any level. Not at Med School. Not at undergrad. Not for full scholarship offers. Not for full tuition paying students. Not at Harvard. Not at Tulane. Not at SUNO. People change their minds. Receive better offers. Take sabbaticals. Walk away from deposits and "binding" commitments. We can disagree on my SWAG of how many of the 130 would have attended but it's not even close to 100%. You have to wait to until they show up on campus for class. Schools don't sue. They simply cash the non-refundable deposits for damages and look to replace the balkers by whatever means appropriate.

Because of that I would have honored the letters and not even publicized the mistake. Not worth the bad pub which has occurred over 30, 60 or 90 students or whoever would have shown up out of a total class of 1700. Just my view. Not like these potential students are unqualified or they would not have even early applied.

[winwave]

Read the article. They were bound to go to Tulane if accepted.

[DfromCT]

Read the article. They were bound to go to Tulane if accepted.

Yes and in a perfect world, all 130 would enroll. But we don't live in a perfect world. I'd put 1000 to 1 odds that all 130 didn't attend. Some wouldn't get the financial aid needed, some would get better offers, others would take a year off, and still others would decide to go to Community College for 2 years then finish at a prestigious University. The last scenario is highly likely when you're talking about $60k/year. Heck, a whole lot of students do that for state schools (with similar or higher academics than Tulane) that are half the cost of Tulane.

And, at the same time, these were 130 students, many of which were in the top 10% of their class, that had Tulane as their first choice. We should have never made the mistake public, and bit the bullet.

[winwave]

The better offers doesn't apply. Like I said read the article. The average financial aid at Tulane is over $40,000. Sure something would come up with some but the number would be much closer than to 130 than the numbers others have suggested.

[DfromCT]

From page one of this thread:

Early decision and Early Action these days is a commitment to the University. If you get accepted ED or EA, it's expected you will enroll. This is a two way street. 130 out of a class of 2000 is not a big number. Step up. Honor your word. Yes, it's a mistake, but the bad PR as fallout from the mistake can be avoided by honoring the email commitment.

And yes, HEADS SHOULD ROLL for this screw up.

Not only did I read the article, but, as the quote above shows, I was the first in the thread to bring up the commitment on both sides with Early Decision.

But even with the commitment, there's ZERO chance that 100% of the group enrolls. Not everyone gets $40k automatically in financial aid. That's fairy tale land. I happen to be related to a student who's mom accepted severance and took a lump sum from her employer her Senior year of HS. She got next to nothing in financial aid offers as a result and went away from the expensive schools. There's 100's of reasons that kids don't enroll even if the school was their first choice. I'd love to see the stat of those admitted Early Decision at Tulane that enroll. I'll bet it's somewhere between 65-75%.

[winwave]

Like I said the number would be a lot closer to 130 than what several here have said.

[Aberzombie1892]

Winwave and D - you're both right to an extent. It's certainly true that less than 130 would enroll if they were all admitted, but it would be shocking if less than 100/130 of those admitted attended, as this early decision process is primarily for people who have great scores that only want to go to Tulane and for people who are borderline or worse in the GPA/ACT/SAT department that would happily shut down their admissions cycle if they are admitted to Tulane and offered minimal financial assistance.

Either way, they shouldn't be admitted unless the would have been admitted anyway and higher profile university's than Tulane have gone through something like this with minimal negative effects.

[mbawavefan12]

Winwave and D - you're both right to an extent. It's certainly true that less than 130 would enroll if they were all admitted, but it would be shocking if less than 100/130 of those admitted attended, as this early decision process is primarily for people who have great scores that only want to go to Tulane and for people who are borderline or worse in the GPA/ACT/SAT department that would happily shut down their admissions cycle if they are admitted to Tulane and offered minimal financial assistance.

Either way, they shouldn't be admitted unless the would have been admitted anyway and higher profile university's than Tulane have gone through something like this with minimal negative effects.

This. It happens every year, many times to schools with higher profiles than Tulane. Sucks for sure.

[DfromCT]

Winwave and D - you're both right to an extent. It's certainly true that less than 130 would enroll if they were all admitted, but it would be shocking if less than 100/130 of those admitted attended, as this early decision process is primarily for people who have great scores that only want to go to Tulane and for people who are borderline or worse in the GPA/ACT/SAT department that would happily shut down their admissions cycle if they are admitted to Tulane and offered minimal financial assistance.

Either way, they shouldn't be admitted unless the would have been admitted anyway and higher profile university's than Tulane have gone through something like this with minimal negative effects.

This. It happens every year, many times to schools with higher profiles than Tulane. Sucks for sure.

Having sold software (in the medical industry) for 15 years now, and at one time having a family software business, deployment should NEVER risk these kind of snafus. You beta test in a secure environment, then test the customer deployment using the customers data before releasing it. You get a backup recent copy of the db that you'll be using and convert it to match your software and then run the tests. This should never happen. If, for example, this happened with a large healthcare system generating emails to patients with false information, we would be sued for millions of dollars. It would have been a death blow to our company. And we delt with customers ranging from private practices to some of the largest healthcare systems in the country. You simply cannot allow this to happen. The fact that it happens to other Universities means whomever is deploying the software isn't being held accountable. It's not rocket science. You test, re-test, and test again with live data that cannot go out the door. Then, assured that all of the bugs created by data conversion and data dumps into the new software have been identified and worked out, you go live. Somebody screwed up bigger than we're willing to admit.

This was not a small error. It was a major F*ck up.

[GreenLantern]

It happens at other universities:

Columbia accidentally accepts then rejects students.
http://www.cnn.com/2017/02/18/us/columb ... index.html