Just two months before they were to begin classes, 499 young men and women who had been accepted to the University of California, Irvine, received letters informing them that their acceptances had been rescinded.

The letters that went out starting last week left students scrambling to either appeal the decision or make other plans for the fall.

“This is not a typical year,’’ Tom Vasich, a spokesman for the university, said in a phone interview Friday. He said the problem arose because “more students than we expected accepted admission to the university.’’

Associated Students of the University of California, Irvine, a student government organization, said in a statement to the school’s enrollment staff on Thursday that the acceptances of some applicants had been rescinded even though they had not made any of the mistakes that would have endangered their admission.

The statement included the testimony of some worried applicants. The accounts were mostly anonymous and shared stories of confusion, desperation, and dead ends.

“I tried calling the Admissions office all day today because I saw the message yesterday after work,’’ one applicant wrote. “I called and was on hold for 40 minutes then I called 50 more times after work. No answer. I have sent out three emails and no response.’’

The students’ situation is hardly unique; horror stories of revoked acceptances surface with some regularity. It happened at the Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health in 2017, at Tulane University in 2016, and at Carnegie Mellon University in 2015, among others.

In those cases, however, the mix-up seemed to have stemmed from administrative mistakes or technological glitches. At UC Irvine this year, both the acceptance letters and the rescinded offers were sent on purpose.

The reason: Too many of the approximately 31,000 students who received acceptance letters said they would attend. The university had to trim the list.

About 7,100 freshmen were accepted and planned to register at the university this fall, about 850 more than the university had planned for, The Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

It trimmed its list in accordance with normal policies, according to a statement from Thomas Parham, the university’s vice chancellor for student affairs.

Those policies required that students maintain acceptable grades through their senior year of high school and turn in all of the required transcripts and test scores on time. This year, the statement said, the school applied its policy more stringently than in the past.