I think the other point to mention, to tag along with Seattle’s point about USC students being well rounded (USC very much has a “work hard play hard” culture), is that American colleges and universities aren’t looking for students so much as they’re looking for LEADERS. As my parents told me all throughout my childhood, Harvard isn’t necessarily looking for the valedictorian. They’re looking for the captain of the football team. I have friends of mine who’ve made it into HLS and other top top top grad programs like that with GPAs as low as 3.3.
The reason is simple, and that’s that the high GPA and standardized test scores is only the first filter. Beyond that, medical schools are looking for future doctors, law schools are looking for future lawyers, etc. The friends of mine who all cracked top professional schools all had all sorts of evidence that they were intrinsically motivated, and that’s stood in sharp contrast, to, say, the people who tried to do law school in their late 20s solely as a way of punting on their careers and getting a 6 figure income. Those people will never stand a chance alongside someone with slightly lower numbers who won all sorts of national awards in debate or mock trial, volunteered at legal aid starting in high school, etc. and who had letters of recommendation from lawyers and judges who at that point had known them for several years.
The reason why I mentioned the smaller (but still excellent) schools is because you won’t have 10,000 people in your biology or political science 101 class (a common complaint from everyone I know who went to UCLA and Berkeley) and thus it’s easier for you to get good grades, learn the material in depth, and (the gold standard) participate in a research project with a professor. That’s the kind of stuff that really helps you get into top programs - yes, having the grades and standardized test numbers, but also working / volunteering at a low level in the field, learning how the profession really works, studying / collaborating with a few great professors, etc. and learning through osmosis from people who’ve been doing for decades whatever it is you want to do. One of my brothers is a doctor, for example, and he worked as a paramedic for a few years between undergrad and med school, and one reason why he had several doctors go to bat for him with admissions committees (and later with residencies) is because in the chaos of the emergency room, he could read x-rays and immediately spot a fracture and thus help save lives. In fact, as I now write this he’s been promoted to run the emergency room and paramedic relations program at the hospital where he works, putting him now in the position of being able to advocate on behalf of the kind of medical school applicants he once was.
FWIW I’ve heard good things about the grad school placements of both Santa Clara and Creighton, which, as I write this, doesn’t surprise me because they’re both Jesuit schools. Obviously they aren’t as selective or prestigious on the undergraduate level, but Jesuit schools have been operating under the whole “educating the whole person” philosophy for centuries before education bureaucrats invented the term in recent years. I also grew up outside Chicago and one of Northwestern law school’s biggest feeder schools was Wheaton College - a top Christian school in the suburbs that, like Santa Clara and Creighton, has always had a strong liberal arts focus and has never strayed from its mission of graduating competent, ethical professionals. Suffice to say, any school that focuses on providing a rigorous liberal arts education and graduating competent, ethical professionals is going to graduate armies of students who are attractive candidates for top graduate programs.
And as for the whole studying by the beach thing, well, if you do it right, you can buy a HOUSE on the beach. 