1,500 Georgia State University applicants got acceptance emails. It was a mistake

(CNN) — Congratulations seemed in order for roughly 1,500 undergraduate applicants to Georgia State University.

Until a retraction message hit their inboxes.

Over 1,000 applicants were told via email they’d been accepted for the 2024-25 school year – before discovering their new status was the result of an oversight by the school’s admissions office, CNN affiliate WSB-TV reported.

The mother of one of the disappointed applicants told WSB-TV her daughter was stunned by the development.

“She really won’t talk about it. She wouldn’t come out of her room all day. She’s just very disappointed,” Vanessa Peters said.

The “welcome” message from the university – whose main campus is in downtown Atlanta – were supposed to go out only to students who had been accepted, WSB-TV reported.

But Peters’ daughter’s application is still in the admissions process, Andrea Jones, vice president of public relations for the school, told WSB-TV.

The school will now be “triple-checking” to ensure the situation is not repeated, it said.

Georgia State University has not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.

Other schools have had similar miscues in the past.

In February, the University of Illinois’ College of Veterinary Medicine sent out acceptance emails to 44 students supposed to be placed on the waitlist, the school’s student newspaper reported.

Northeastern University in Boston has made a similar mistake, twice. Most recently in December 2023, when 48 applicants for master’s degree programs were sent an erroneous acceptance email, the Boston Globe reported.

The year before, 3,930 former and 205 current law school applicants were accepted to Northeastern’s law school by mistake.

But the decisions had not yet been finalized. The law school “quickly sent a clarifying email explaining the error,” according to a statement shared with CNN from the university.

CNN’s Zoe Sottile contributed to this report.