Northeastern emails false acceptances again

For the second year in a row, Northeastern University pulled the rug out from would-be Northeastern graduate students, mistakenly sending out acceptance emails to applicants.

The applicants are now being updated with the message: While they’re not in, they’re not necessarily out either. They’ll just have to wait a bit longer to find out.

Northeastern spokesperson Daniel Sarro said in a statement that “due to a technical error, 48 individuals out of nearly 64,000 applicants for master’s degree programs received an erroneous email of acceptance.”

“They were immediately contacted by the university to clarify the mistake,” he said. “Their applications remain active as reviews are currently underway for all applicants. Decisions will be finalized in early January.”

The university declined to comment further on what steps it would take to make sure this type of mistake does not happen again. Or why it happened twice in two years.

Last year, the Northeastern University School of Law sent 205 erroneous emails, telling applicants they had been accepted into the incoming class. At the time, the school similarly blamed a technical error.

These issues are not unheard of at colleges around the country, including locally. In 2014, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology accidentally sent an email to an unspecified number of applicants that read, “You are on this list because you are admitted to MIT!”

An MIT admissions counselor said at the time the error occurred after admissions staff tried to consolidate email lists.