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<p>Acceptance rate dips to all-time low
USC receives 34,000 applications for next year and accepts fewer than 25 percent.
Michael Stapleton</p>
<p>Issue date: 4/17/06 Section: News</p>
<p>Freshman applicants to the class of 2010 faced a challenge that no other incoming class has faced before - the lowest acceptance rate in USC history.</p>
<p>The acceptance rate for next year's incoming freshmen was just below 25 percent, 3 percent lower than last year's rate of 27 percent. </p>
<p>USC received approximately 34,000 freshman applications this year and admitted approximately 8,400 students. </p>
<p>"The number of freshman applications increased by about 7.5 percent (approximately 2,400 applications) over last year," Timothy Brunold, director of admissions at USC wrote in an e-mail.</p>
<p>"Our application increases illustrate the fact that USC continues to be a very hot institution. Our 7.5-percent increase outpaced the national growth of the college-growing population," Brunold wrote. </p>
<p>Brunold pointed out that more high school students are interested in going to college than ever before, but colleges and universities are not expanding the size of their freshman classes. </p>
<p>High school seniors don't just face the challenge of competing with students with higher GPAs and SAT scores: Now they have to compete with more out-of-state and international applicants, Brunold wrote. </p>
<p>According to the USC freshman class profile, this year's freshmen had to compete with students from 2,672 other high schools all over the world. USC attracted nearly 6,000 international applicants last year, most of whom came from Hong Kong, India, Canada, Singapore, Taiwan and the United Kingdom.</p>
<p>Brunold said he was pleased to see even more applicants this year from the East Coast and other countries and attributed this geographic diversity to new marketing and recruitment efforts. </p>
<p>USC is not the only selective university to see decreased acceptance rates. Yale University's acceptance rate declined to 8.6 percent from 9.7 percent; Harvard University's rate sank to 9.3 percent; and Columbia University's hit an all-time low of 9.6 percent. </p>
<p>Many prospective USC students said they were not deterred by the trend of decreasing acceptance rates.</p>
<p>"I would never not apply to any school because of lower acceptance rates," said Jason Shao, a high school student who spent last week on a college tour trip and visited USC.</p>
<p>Shao said he was looking at a variety of competitive schools, including UCSD, UCLA, Stanford University and UC Berkeley, and is not deterred by the college admissions crunch.</p>
<p>Sherry Chen, an international student from Canada who wants to study art design, agreed with Shao.</p>
<p>"I applied to schools that had great reputations for their art programs," she said, "but I never really stopped to think about college acceptance rates."</p>
<p>Billy Galaviz, a high school senior from San Marcos, Texas, said USC's decreased acceptance rate this year didn't affect him, but it could.</p>
<p>"If I thought I really had no chance for a school in California, I probably wouldn't apply," he said. "When I was applying to colleges, I only applied to colleges in other states that were really appealing to me."</p>
<p>Some students said they see this admissions challenge as a greater impetus to be a more competitive applicant. </p>
<p>"I just see it as another reason to work harder," said Angelina Gonzalez, a student at Carson High School in Carson, Calif.</p>
<p>Gonzalez said she isn't spending too much time worrying about acceptance rates. Instead, she is visiting universities to find strong child psychology programs and get a sense of the campus environment.</p>
<p>Nonetheless, even some highly qualified USC applicants are feeling the effects of these college admissions challenges. </p>
<p>Samantha Rifkin, a senior a the Buckley School in Beverly Hills, has a weighted high school GPA of 4.3 and was not admitted to the fall 2006 semester. Rifkin said she received admission for the spring 2007 semester at USC.</p>
<p>Brunold, the admissions director, however, wrote that prospective students should expect the competition to continue to grow, at least for the next few years. </p>
<p>"We know that most demographic projections suggest that the numbers of high school graduates will continue to increase each year until about 2010 or 2011," Brunold wrote. "Greater numbers of high school graduates means more students interested in going to college, which obviously also means the potential for application increases."</p>