When is a college acceptance letter not a college acceptance letter? When a school suddenly realizes that it has 800 more freshmen than it knows what to do with. This is what happened last month at the University of California, Irvine, which—in an effort to reduce that number—started rescinding offers of admissions to kids who had not kept their GPA high enough or who had failed to submit a final high school transcript by the deadline.

The first group of students was not very significant and, of course, they had only themselves to blame. But among the second group, there was an uproar. Sending a final transcript was a mere formality and, at any rate, it was the high schools’ responsibility to send it in. As an editorial in the Los Angeles Times noted, “Failure to meet the deadline for a single document out of the reams of paper demanded during the admissions process calls for a little proportionality on the part of the university.” And eventually the school’s president relented.