USC is not a California public school. It shouldn’t be more difficult for an OOS student. If anything, it should be easier.
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Interesting, as I thought the UCB rivalry is with Stanford. Big Game and all that…
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Yes, in general, USC and UCLA are Los Angeles rivals. Cal and Stanford are Bay Area rivals. USC and Notre Dame have a long standing football rivalry.
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Like the other poster mentioned, USC is a private school. Not public. OOS doesn’t matter. In fact, it might be a plus depending on where you’re from.
UCB’s long-standing rival is Stanford. The annual USC vs UCLA football game is usually pretty epic.
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While that’s true, USC still seems to favor Californians with its admissions, and certainly has done so historically.
Yeah, the tour guide ‘secretly’ told us OOS has lower chance to be admitted, and the school favors California residents. I checked the previous CDS from 2021 to 2022, 39% were OOS. So I don’t know whats up with the guide’s comment. 
Maybe the guide has a thing against UCB? sbinaz is right about rivalry between regional schools. Naturally USC would be a rival with UCLA, and UCB with Stanford. I think we might just got a weird out guide when we toured.
This site may be of interest:
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Williams doesn’t seem that open based on their requirements. Sounds like many universities that require x many in social science, reasoning, etc.
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I think it’s not unheard of for privates to favor ~locals. Harvard gives a tip to Boston area residents I think. I would presume others might act in similar ways…
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According to USC’s Common Data Set, Geographical Residence and State Residency are not considered.
Remember, CA is the most populous state. It has 33% more people than Texas (#2) and twice the population of Florida (#3). USC receives a significantly larger number of applications from CA than from any other state.
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Which reminds me of this topical xkcd (because there is always a topical xkcd, apparently): xkcd: Heatmap
I’m always skeptical of breathless reports that say that California has more people who X than anywhere else! or the like (or, for stuff centered in the South replace Florida or Texas, for the Northeast replace New York, et cetera)—raw numbers are just telling us where the people are, not where the phenomenon is overrepresented.
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To further drive home the point, the population of Los Angeles County is larger than 40 states.
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They may be true but many schools balance enrollment to have geographically diversity, ISC does not appear to do so to the extent some other private schools do.
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Correct. According to their Common Data Set, USC does not consider geographical or state residency when evaluating an applicant. This is different than the UCs and CSUs which prioritize admission for California residents over OOS students.
International students composed 17% of this year’s applicants and 19% of admits. Their numbers are up about 10% compared to last year, and up 40% compared to 2019, the last admission cycle prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
After the United States, the countries most represented are China, India, Canada, South Korea and Singapore.
Thousands of admitted students live in California. This year’s in-state contingent makes up 38% of the cohort. The most represented states outside California are New York, Texas, Illinois, Washington and New Jersey.
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TBH if this is truly an important feature for you I would dig deeper into this. Ask for stats on how many classes at each of the other schools the average Amherst kid takes in 4 years. All but U Mass Amherst are a meaningful drive away (30+ minutes each way, realistically speaking), and U Mass Amherst is a decent walk or short-ish bike ride away. Which is not to say that kids don’t do it. They do. But our research showed that it was something that got more airtime than deep use in practice. The only consortium IME where it truly feels like you’d feel like you were at a bigger school community would be the 5C schools (Claremont schools). BOW (Babson Olin Wellesley) to a lesser degree - Olin and Babson are immediately adjacent, W about a mile away.
Umm…I guess it depends on how one defines generally 
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Wow, I drove past Babson about 3x per week this past year (beautiful campus in every season!) and I had no idea Olin was adjacent. Interesting!
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You’d be forgiven for missing it! It’s a small cluster of buildings arrayed in a circle, not especially visible from the road. Olin’s enrollment is approximately 350 (!!!) students, all undergrads.
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Hampshire is about 8 minutes drive, Mt Holyoke 15, Smith 20. I agree based on talking to students it is a contingency plan that some use little, and many not at all, but my point was if the open curriculum led you to exhaust the class options in a particular area at your college, then taking some additional classes at another college would be an option.
The Amherst area is about 30 minutes from Springfield, an hour from Hartford. It is indeed all relative, but compared to, say, Dartmouth, it felt much closer to urban New England to me.
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Worst tour ever? AMHERST (and I am an alum)’ not only did i/we think so but so did my college roommate who also toured earlier this spring and another college roommate’s niece; all 3 kids (class 2024) preferred Williams or basically ANY other school over amherst just based on the tour/tour guide
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I’m a Williams grad grateful for the 4 years there that changed my life in so many amazing ways. However, my D18 who grew up with an Eph banner in her bedroom preferred Amherst over Williams in part due to the charming and charismatic tour guide we had at Amherst. And months later my daughter befriended that tour guide during her overnight and still keeps in touch with her over 5 years later even though D18 chose another school in the end. It’s amazing how much of an outsized influence a good/bad tour guide and the weather can have. My daughter was enamored as well with what she perceived was the higher energy student centric community in the Pioneer Valley with its over 30k students vs. the all too familiar and quieter Williamstown.
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