College Sends 300 Full Scholarship Offers In Error

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Should a college that sent offers of full scholarships by mistake have to fulfill its original promise? Apparently university officials don’t believe so. Last month, Utah Valley University sent 300 high school seniors letters offering them four-year scholarships that paid full tuition.

As a result of your stellar academic performance in high school, I’m thrilled to extend the offer of an Exemplary Scholarship, a four-year full tuition award,” each letter, which was personally addressed to each recipient and signed by university president Matthew Holland, stated.

But just two weeks later officials discovered the letters were sent in error. According to Holland, a system glitch caused the mistake. The Exemplary Scholarship is based off of high-school GPA as well as ACT scores, but the error occurred when only ACT scores were considered.

This is an extremely rare occurrence, but due to an unfortunate, technical glitch in our system, some individuals received scholarship offer letters who did not qualify for the scholarship,” university spokesman Chris Taylor told the Desert News. “As soon as we discovered a mistake had been made, we notified the individuals and sent a letter of apology. We again apologize to those who received the letters in error.”

If the university really wanted to do the right thing, it would have honored the scholarships, rather than reneging its offers based on its own mistake. But Taylor did make a half-hearted effort to accommodate the effected students.

Those who received letters and didn’t qualify for this particular scholarship (Exemplary Scholarship) are encouraged to apply for any other scholarship they may qualify for,” Taylor told the Desert News. “The scholarship deadline was Feb. 1 for incoming students, but that deadline has been waived for those impacted by this mistake.”

[Image via Facebook/UVUWolverines]