In An ‘Unprecedented’ Admissions Error, One Texas School Revoked 50 Scholarships

Nepalese students had been awarded presidential scholarships to attend the University of Texas at Tyler.

By Alexandra HartMay 3, 2018 2:09 pm

After awarding full scholarships to 50 Nepalese students to attend the University of Texas at Tyler, the university revoked the scholarships because of what officials have called an “oversight.”

Eric Hoover, a reporter for the Chronicle of Higher Education, says the university hasn’t given any further explanation.

“The merit scholarship was offered to far more students than they had the budget to finance,” Hoover says. “And at some point, it sounds like pretty late in the game, they realized that they had promised more than they could deliver and they had to decide how to roll back.”

Hoover says the incident appears to be an example of what can happen when a university’s estimates are wrong.

“Admissions is both an art and a science,” he says. “And so predictive models are often used to figure out what will happen, how many students will come and at what price.”

Still, Hoover says administrators at other colleges are calling the scale of this mistake unprecedented.

“To have promised so much more money to so many more students than could possibly be delivered, to them suggests that someone might have been asleep at the switch,” he says.

The school says that of the 50 students affected, 30 of the students will receive a full scholarship and others have been offered partial scholarships.

Written by Jen Rice.