A Modest Marriage Proposal

BYU Admissions Office, 2023

No one noticed the mistake until the phone calls started coming in.

“How did my daughter, a student body president with a 4.8 GPA and a 36 ACT, not get in? There must be some mistake!”

Now, of course every year there are “there must be some mistake” calls, but those usually involve a delusional parent or a panicked email from a bishop asking them to please disregard his ecclesiastical endorsement. But the sheer volume of calls told them that this time there really was a mixup.

This was the first year that they had hired an outside contractor to handle the high volume of admission/rejection letters, a contract they shared with BYU-Idaho. After a couple of tense hours of investigation, they discovered that the girls whom BYU had intended to admit were sent rejection letters, but were also sent acceptance letters to BYU-I. Meanwhile the girls who were supposed to get rejection letters from BYU and acceptance letters to BYU-I got the reverse. The boys’ letters were unaffected. (more…)