Admissions & Enrollment Planning wrongfully denied 262 transfer applications for the fall semester due to an error.
Cal Poly Pomona began issuing out acceptance letters and denials in February. The process was supposed to be completed by March 31, but according to Deborah Brandon, executive director of Admissions & Enrollment Planning, the issue was brought to the office’s attention by a counselor from another school and was resolved within a few days.
Brandon said that out of the 7,000 transfer students that were denied, the office found that 350 of them were denied for not meeting certain transfer requirements or had an insufficient GPA. Two hundred sixty-two students were later admitted despite the error.
Little explanation was given of what the error actually was.
Brandon said it was “not a system issue.”
One of the possible reasons she gave was that some students might have forgotten to add AP courses to their applications.
Other than that, no other explanation was given for the error.
This is the first year that admissions communicated to students the reason for being denied acceptance.
In the past, an applicant’s status would only state that the student was not CSU eligible.
It was up to the student to then appeal the decision and find out the reason as to why he or she was denied.
“It was our error, so we didn’t make the students appeal the decision,” Brandon said.
While Brandon said the issue was resolved within a few days of first sending out acceptances and denials in February, the issue progressed much longer, at least for some.
A transfer student from Pasadena City College, Ashley Boomsma, who is this reporter’s sister, applied to the Collins College of Hospitality Management’s hospitality management program and was denied in late March for not meeting the 60 transferable unit requirements.
Since Boomsma had more units than were required for the transfer and had a 3.6 GPA, she met with counselors on multiple occasions to ensure her application was sufficient.
She said she was sure everything was in order.
“It was the only school I applied to,” Boomsma said.
“I decided in mid-high school this was a very clear passion and talent that I have and I wanted to follow that. Ever since then, I was just focused on this school and this degree.”
She submitted her application in early December and her answer came March 20.
Her BroncoDirect status read that she was not CSU eligible because she didn’t complete the required 60-unit transfer requirement.
“I worked for three years to go to Cal Poly and a lot was riding on that,” she said. “It was devastating [feeling] like I wasted those three years.”
On April 5, Laurence Pickett, a second-year civil engineering student and student assistant working the admissions desk, said that there was a glitch in the system, so Boomsma’s situation was similar to that of a lot of other transfer applicants.
“I’m only here Monday and Friday and I get maybe 20-25 calls a day [about it],” Pickett said.
Boomsma was told her application would be reviewed only after this reporter asked the admissions office do so.
Boomsma was accepted on April 29, nearly a month after acceptances were supposed to be completed.
“The mistake wasn’t the issue [being wrongfully denied], it was someone’s decision not to tell me,” she said. “Or just not bothering to tell me.”