What is happening to USC? The majority of threads are about transferring to USC. Are there no high school students interested in matriculating directly from high school any more? Is USC indistinguishable from UCLA, California State, and other public school systems?
There are plenty interested, but with a 35% international population and acceptances of various groups to bring in a diverse student body, there are plenty of 4.0+ or in other ways amazing kids that aren’t getting in that really want to attend. Add to that the SCion/legacy students that are rejected and held hostage for a year by the Trojan Transfer plan to make room for previous mentioned students, the only way in is to transfer for many students. With 43,000 students and being the same size as UCLA now, I don’t think it is distinguishable. Try calling admissions with a question and you will get the elitist attitude that says “honey there are a thousand kids behind you that would take your place, so whatevs.” Frankly, the administrative folks are friendlier at UCLA. And this is coming from a Trojan through and through. It has changed for sure, some for the better, but in others ways that are not good. It’s not the transfer students fault, USC is turning itself into a behemoth. I’m sympathetic to transfers, while some hear in May, many don’t find out till late June/July - I think that is crazy when other schools do it so much earlier forcing kids to potentially lose a good size deposit to cover their bases. But USC gets their $80 app fee.
Wow, USC indeed has lost its character as a mid sized private school. I would send my kid to Vandy or even Emory over USC, which truly is a private but uber expensive version of UCLA or Cal.
The Trustees should fire Nikias. His globalist and public school obsession is destroying USC.
@SeattleTW the recent surge in transfer threads was specifically meant to bring you back. The forum hasn’t been the same without your ranting hyperbole. While others might be annoyed by your half-truths and long diatribes, I find them entertaining. Welcome back!
Naturally, you’d make this thread on the one month out of the year that transfer students are getting their acceptances. Freshmen applicants have either already gotten over their euphoria of getting in or disappointment from getting rejected. Keep confirming that selection bias. I hope you send your kid to Vandy or Emory too.
Don’t blame me for the mess Nikias continues to cause.
I happen to like the idea that USC offers opportunities to transfer students that other snob schools don’t.
Yup, that option should be offered to 500 students tops. USC is a 4-year college, after all. Nikias has to go!
Seattle, you are painfully tone deaf on issues of class and money. USC right now costs around $70,000 per year for a stupid undergraduate degree. Right now, I personally know a kid who was admitted to several top tier universities but is instead taking a full scholarship to b*sh California Lutheran University because she wants to be a lawyer and doesn’t want to bankrupt her family and suscept herself to crushing levels of debt for a fancy undergrad degree. She can still go to a no-name undergrad school and, with good grades, test scores, and letters of recommendation, go on to a brand name law school. She just doesn’t want to bankrupt her family for a stupid political science degree.
BTW this person is graduating from a high school that consistently ranks as one of the top 50-100 in the country according to U.S. News and plenty of other rankings. She also won an individual national championship in a top academic competition last year and, frankly, any school would be lucky to have her.
The flip side of that is another idiot that I know, who took out $400,000 in student loans to get stupid communications degrees, and can’t even begin to pay back those loans even though he’s now tenure-track at a Cal State school.
What none of the fancy college brochures mention nowadays is something that the Wall Street Journal has been covering for several years now - that a lot of top companies have stopped recruiting at top private universities, because attendance at them now correlates more to family wealth than it does to hard work and personal achievement.
@USCAlum05 - thank you for offering that perspective. As parents, we always want the best for our kids, to the extent of making some sacrifices in the hope of a better future for them. I certainly agree being successful is not always tied up to the school that one went. Many factors do come into play.
Personally I’m pretty ecstatic to see my kid going to USC from the other four schools that also accepted him. We visited USC and also the other four schools recently and we are convinced that it is the school that will fit my kid’s personality and aspiration despite concerns that I have read in CC about its size and direction. Thank you and a great day to all.
I’m quite bullish about USC in particular - the school has a ton of upward momentum and is well positioned to be able to do great things going forward - but I am quite jaded about the education system as a whole. Of course you want the best for your kids, but the universities are exploiting your love of your children and your desire to set them up for success in an ever more competitive global economy, by charging higher and higher fees and offering less and less in return. Frankly, I question the values of these institutions nowadays.
As for questions about its size and direction, well I think USC is going in a better direction than 99% of the universities around the world. And its size isn’t so much an issue on the undergrad level (undergrad enrollment is still about the same, as the growth has been in the graduate programs, especially master’s programs) as the university does do a fantastic job of making a big school feel small. I never felt like a number, which is something I didn’t give them nearly enough credit for at the time.
^ Yes, undergrad size, although still larger than at most privates, isn’t so bad. Grad schools are the main cause, which won’t change their size anytime soon; they want the $$$ from all those masters degrees (ehhem likely to fund undergrad stuff).
@SeattleTW: If my kid gets into USC straight out of HS, but doesn’t receive one of the major scholarships or Finaid, I would have to consider why I should spend over $280,000 for my kid to have a USC degree, when my kid could get the same USC degree for $140,000 plus the considerably cheaper cost of community college. About 40 % of undergrads are transfers, and a significant portion of those are CC transfers. Since USC admits so many transfers, there is a pretty good chance of being admitted as a transfer. I would think that answers your question about why there are so many transfer threads.
I think it is also interesting that if a student has 30 college credits, USC transfer applicants don’t submit SAT scores. That would have to be appealing to a lot of students as well. Many other private colleges and universities do require test scores.
USC is not the only elite school to admit larger numbers of transfers, and yes that’s a function of being a California school, with a state that has what’s generally been considered the best community college system in the country. I went to a 2 year school back east and got in and out for $2000 (full scholarship for my second year), which was less than the cost of ONE CLASS at USC.
I would also encourage high school students to look at the fellowships that Silicon Valley venture capitalist Peter Thiel has been offering - $100,000 to top high school students to NOT go to college, to move to San Francisco and start a business, and to self-educate online. He’s housing all of the fellows together, giving them the same kind of network and credential that a traditional college education gives them, with the idea that you can learn most of what you’d learn in college nowadays on Wikipedia. Thiel has changed the rules of the program around a bit as it’s grown, but the basic principle is the same - college is a bubble that’s due to burst and a system/institution long overdue for some creative destruction, while the Thiel website for a long time had up a Mark Twain quotation that I absolutely loved, that you should never let school get in the way of your education.
Thiel webpage:
http://thielfellowship.org/
Wikipedia page:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thiel_Fellowship
Interesting to see what some of those kids have already done. And I love that they have former Harvard president Larry Summers quoted on there as saying it’s the most misguided form of philanthropy this decade. Summers is the son of two former Penn professors (economics) and responsible for one of the more provocative, politically incorrect talks in education this century, so his skepticism is a highly worthy albeit unintended endorsement of Thiel.
Two other points:
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That’s $280,000 for an undergrad degree (the traditional college-going upper middle class demographic is the one being crushed by this), assuming the kid doesn’t change his/her major and have to stay another semester or year. A lot of schools are also cutting back on their acceptance of AP credits, meaning that it’s a lot more difficult to matriculate as a sophomore and graduate in 3 years. And that $280,000 is also for only one kid. If you have more than one kid, you’re now looking at over half a million dollars to get your offspring a stupid undergraduate degree. Contrast that with the days of the 1960s-1980s, when the University of California schools were completely tuition-free.
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One other reason why so many community college kids are reaching out on forums like this is because community colleges are the bastard stepchild of higher education and, although many great kids are starting out in 2 year schools now for financial reasons, there’s still the snob factor on the part of those who don’t know what it’s like to struggle. Community colleges are often grossly underfunded which means that the students going through there are almost completely on their own when it comes to figuring out which classes will transfer. It’s not the same thing, but several of the prep schools around L.A have one guidance counselor for every 30 students, and the kids meet regularly with those same counselors, while in L.A. Unified a lot of public high schools have one guidance counselor for every 800 students. Good luck developing any sort of rapport with a counselor in that kind of situation. Ergo, online forums.
Actually, our D got guidance from the USC admissions person assigned to HI in her course selection for CC, and nearly everything transferred (except one online course she took before conferring with admissions). She transferred after 3 terms in CC. It worked great for her and our family.
USC should be made affordable for high school matriculates. Nikias doesn’t care about that. He would rather spend, spend, spend, and then bring in transfers, on-line grad students and others from foreign nations to pay the bills. He’s destroying the four-year construct in the process. I completely sympathize with those who cannot afford to send their kids to USC for four years. But Nikias is exacerbating the problem. In short, rather than make it easier to attend USC for all four years, he’s basically throwing in the towel and turning USC into a two-year college.
What a jerk.
I can appreciate what you’re saying, but…
a) The two year transfer phenomenon is specific to California in particular, owing to the state’s strong history of community colleges. This is not true in other states;
b) What you complain about in terms of online grad students and international students other people would see as the growing pains and experimentation of higher education in an age of globalization and new technology;
c) Our opinions don’t matter unless we’re willing to donate millions to the university. Unfortunately, that’s just how USC operates; and
d) When it comes to kids and parents trying to get their kids a decent education and not bankrupt themselves in the process, don’t hate the players, hate the game. I don’t hear any similar complaints about trustee / presidential / Mork scholars taking full/half tuition rides whose numbers have increased the prestige of the university and the value of the degree.
USC is no longer a four year school, it’s a two year college that has reached the law of diminishing returns. Until Nikias leaves, USC will never achieve top tier status.
You know what’s interesting though, the cc students that I encounter at SC are usually harder working than the students who came in as freshman. The reason for this is probably because people who matriculate at USC who transferred from community have either went through immense trauma at one point in their lives, or have used cc as their second chance in life and have the desire not to waste their efforts during their time at SC. Idk where your hate from community kids come from, but you’re severely misguided if you think there is some sore of superiority of freshman students over transfers.