Never Know What You'll Find When You Open Up Your Letterbox

Above the Law reports that Columbia Law School sent an e-mail Wednesday to people who most definitely did not have applications under review by the CLS admissions committee (including current first-year Columbia students and non-enrolled applicants from 2007), informing them that their applications were under review by the CLS admissions committee. Columbia appears to have sent a correction and apology relatively soon after the original message, and it's unclear whether the message was sent to anyone who had been previously rejected by CLS in the current application cycle (thereby executing a double-reverse re-raise-hope-dash on the unsuspecting recipient).

On its own, the CLS mistake isn't particularly noteworthy (as several of the always-eloquent ATL commenters take pains to point out). But the incident underscores yet again the epidemic of apathy or carelessness in properly managing e-mail communication with applicants currently sweeping through the land of higher education. See, for example, similar errors at UNC Law, UC-San Diego, Cornell, and NYU's Wagner School. And those are just examples from the past two months. And just the examples from the past two months that turned up in a cursory Google search. People applying to school are a vulnerable lot (they're looking for acceptance, get it?), and this is invariably embarrassing for the school; a little extra caution with the SEND button would serve everybody.

So it goes. At least nobody's e-mailed sensitive information to the undergraduate population of an entire college.

Ah.