The Fulbright flap is not yet final for the 30 college students who had their scholarship applications disqualified because of a missed Federal Express pickup.

The national board that oversees Fulbright programs is reviewing a decision by the Department of Education to reject the 30 applicants, all of whom are doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley.

Steven J. Uhlfelder, chairman of the J. William Fulbright Foreign Scholarship Board, said he would convene a teleconference on Tuesday.

"The purpose of the meeting is to gather information from both parties and try to see if there is anything that we can do," Mr. Uhlfelder said in a telephone interview. "I don't want to give false hopes. I am not sure if we can do anything."

The Department of Education angered the Berkeley administration, disappointed students and embarrassed FedEx when it refused to make an exception to its deadline.

FedEx has accepted responsibility for the applications not being picked up by the deadline, Oct. 20, 2003, citing a "software glitch." But Education Department officials said the university should have taken the applications to the post office.

Mr. Uhlfelder, who was named to the Fulbright board in 2001 by President Bush, said the board normally did not get involved in administrative decisions. But after learning of the Berkeley situation, he said, there was a need to "make sure everyone feels they were treated fairly."

Last year, 15 of Berkeley's 30 doctoral applicants were awarded Fulbright grants.

"We students want to compete with our peers around the nation, but we're being denied the opportunity for reasons beyond our control," one of the disqualified applicants, Carl Freire, said in an e-mail interview.

Competing peers might have helped Mr. Freire get another shot.

"One of the first e-mails I got was from a Stanford student telling me how wrong this was," Mr. Uhlfelder said. "My son went to Stanford, and there is no great love between Stanford and Cal."