Some spurned college applicants hoping to burn their rejection letters won’t get their pyrotechnic satisfactions this year — a handful of colleges and universities have stopped sending rejection letters in paper form.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University nixed paper rejection letters for applicants who checked their admissions decisions online this year. At Penn and Yale, letters were still sent to rejected applicants who did not check their admissions decisions online within a certain time; MIT made an exception for applicants who did not have access to online decisions.
Jeffrey Brenzel, dean of admissions at Yale, said the decision was aimed at cutting the “significant expense” of sending out rejection letters, the Yale Daily News reported.
Cost was a secondary concern at Penn, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported. The university’s dean of admissions, Eric Furda, told the newspaper that the admissions office was trying to avoid adding insult to injury by sending rejection letters to applicants who had already gotten the news online. —David Shieh
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