One of the core objectives of this college admissions blog is to make the highly selective college admissions process less stressful for all who are navigating its churning waters. So when we see a university or an organization that is making the process unnecessarily more stressful for applicants during this already intense time, we will stand atop our soapbox in college admissions and call them out in a heartbeat. Today, like so many days over the last 30 years, we call out The Common Application.

With looming deadlines for transfer applicants, including a February 15th deadline for the University of Southern California, the transfer application was down for a good part of February 15th. When USC hopefuls anticipated logging into their applications to give them a final proof, they were instead met with an ominous message that read, “The Centralized Application Service is temporarily unavailable. We’re currently performing maintenance on the system, but don’t worry we’ll be back up shortly! We apologize for any inconvenience that this has caused and appreciate your bearing with us. In the meantime, please check out our Help Center for more information about using this service.”

For starters, Common App., don’t tell students not to worry when it’s your platform that is down with only hours to spare before a deadline. Also, when such an event occurs (and it occurs way too often through the years), give an idea of when it will be back up and running. An hour? Two hours? Ever? It’s bad enough that there are so many glitches on the transfer portal of The Common Application. But then the application isn’t even live when it should be live. Get it together, Common App.!