Is there any chance that the reputation of USC improves to where it’s like WashU or Vanderbilt in the next 5-10 years? As it is now, will selectivity increase or decrease in the next couple of years?
At the the present rate of progression, pretty likely. WashU and Vandy are definitely within reach in 5-10 years, I think a more ambitious 10 year target would be JHU and Northwestern. I feel like Duke would be the ultimate school to catch up to before the 20 year mark, and I’m optimistic it’ll happen.
There are a lot of factors that play into this. For one, the more distance USC puts between the present and its history, the better. Kids applying to college today were born before USC was even fully out of its dark ages. Older folks who still have stubborn notions of USC being a 70% acceptance rate school from when they went to college, are now entering their 50s and their biases are becoming less heard and less relevant. In other words, they’re no longer parents and aunts and uncles.
There’s no way USC can make up for the 50 nobel prizes Stanford has on us in such a short period of time. This will hold USC back in graduate-specific research rankings for many more years. These rankings place less weight on present performance, and more on historically accumulated “scores”. That’s why they barely change year after year in the first place.
USC could barely have been called a research institution until the 80s and 90s, so they’re a hundred years behind in academic maturity compared to other 19th century schools that were “academically serious” since inception. USC may as well have been founded after UCSD - the fact that it can now even be compared among schools in the top 20 says a lot about the first derivative of USC’s upward path. 5 out of 8 of USC’s nobel prizes were attained in only the last 15 years. USC has been shelling out ridiculous amounts of money intercepting young graduates from top PhD programs, to the point where most of my STEM professors are now Ivy league or Stanford grads. This is how USC is investing in producing nobel prize winners in-house, but the dividends will take decades to pay out.
USC’s acceptance rate is a non-issue. USC is a famous school despite what people will say about regionality - half of USC’s applicants are from out of state. It’s the 10th most applied to undergraduate institution in the nation (verifiable through google). As a private school, USC could gradually downsize its undergraduate class to the size of Cornell (19k > 14k) and achieve a single digit acceptance rate if it wanted to. It doesn’t need to though, as USC benefits from being in the most populated in the US, that also happens to contain the highest concentration of overachieving white/asian high school kids.
Applications stagnated for the 2013 and 2015 classes because of some very bad publicity involving students getting killed near campus. In both those years, we also fell behind UCLA in the USNWR. That dulled a lot of applications coming out of China. In 2014 though, applications increased over 10% from the previous year. Nothing too bad happened in 2015, so expect a comparable surge. I think the acceptance rate will hit 16.5% for this application cycle, finally overtaking Berkeley in selectivity. If I’m wrong then I’ll look like an idiot because I can’t delete posts on college confidential.
Anyways, the important thing is that once the acceptance rate falls below 15%, USC will reach an event horizon. The largest hindering factor for USC’s yield rate has always been how close the competition has been between USC, Berkeley, and UCLA. In breaking away from this cannibalistic trio and entering a tier of selectivity of its own in between the UCs and Stanford, I think there will be much more convincing of an allure to apply and matriculate.
USC’s acceptance rate may hit single digits before the next olympics, but who knows.
It takes a long time for school’s image to change, I think USC has done what it can and made the big leap already, and it will hold where it is at for pretty long period of time. For all those that think USC is doing great things, there are many being turned off by other things like the giant public school size it is becoming. That growth has growing pains with it, that are simmering to the surface for a lot of people. Some of the schools mentioned - Northwestern, Duke, Wash U, etc., have been icons for decades, I believe it would be decades before USC is near that status. The big sports reputation will always keep it a big sports school versus primarily known for its academics like a Northwester or Wash U. Then again, what does it matter, USC is a great school as is for it’s own reasons. You can get a good education at so many schools if you want to.
^ I don’t necessarily agree. Duke was relatively obscure in the 1980s. It has been incandescent ever since and has managed to cultivate an absolutely stellar academic reputation whilst competing at the highest level athletically.
USC does have the money and the location to be a top 10 school in 30 years time. Of course, no one knows what the academic landscape will look like then. Schools like Duke and Stanford are likely to continue to innovate but some of the “lesser” Ivies are already becoming somewhat complacent and may fall to the wayside in years to come.
Also, it took 30 years of academic excellence for Stockholm to take notice of Duke’s exceptional faculty. USC already has a Nobel laureate on faculty and that puts it ahead of 99.99% of the world’s research universities (and some Ivies like Dartmouth). I’m bullish about USC’s prospects and I think it is reasonably well positioned at this point in time.
I understand that public schools usually don’t market themselves/actively seek to improve their reputation as much as private schools.
Do you guys think USC will surpass UCLA in terms of academic prestige in the years to come? If so, how long is it going to take?
Why does it matter how much “prestige” it gets? You shouldn’t be going to a school based on prestige in the first place. Both UCLA and USC are wonderful schools and well respected. No one knows what the rankings will be in the years to come, but the standard of education will most likely not drop, so why bother thinking about things that don’t matter?
@anxiousenior1 I personally won’t be making the decision to attend College A over College B just because College A is more “prestigious” than College B, but many others will and it will undoubtedly affect the quality of the student body, number of applications, and recruitment of academic faculty.
This usually “snowballs” into a stronger alumni network and in turn, even more prestige.
Like it or not, prestige is pretty important. To say it “doesn’t matter” is ridiculous.
My point was that the difference between UCLA and USC in terms of prestige is negligible. There is hardly a difference in public opinion unless you are an alum of one or the other. It really doesn’t matter whether you go to UCLA or USC; it’s not ridiculous to say that the difference in prestige between the two doesn’t matter if you’re choosing one or the other.
Schools like Columbia and Penn rapidly ascended the rankings in part due to the revitalization of their urban campuses. The construction of USC Village should be a great step toward doing the same for USC.
That was the question that I was asking in the first place. I’m well aware that both schools are around the same level, but I was wondering if one could surpass the other down the road.
It’s not ridiculous to say that the difference in prestige between the two doesn’t matter if you’re choosing between one or the other, but it is ridiculous to say that prestige doesn’t matter.
@nerdychica " I don’t necessarily agree. Duke was relatively obscure in the 1980s. It has been incandescent ever since and has managed to cultivate an absolutely stellar academic reputation whilst competing at the highest level athletically."
Where did you come up with that nonsense?
Duke has been a high profile, USNews Top 10 school since USNews started it’s rankings in the mid 80s. As high as top 3 in the 80s.
Hardly “relatively obscure” in the 80s, lol. (And of course it’s reputation and high profile go back further than that).
Lots of nutty stuff said here on CC.
USC, on the other hand, was an academic joke with zero academic prestige until relatively recently.
They’ve done a great job rising in the rankings and improving their academics, but USC has no history or tradition of academic excellence. It’ll take another 30 years and another generation or two to pass before usc’s undistinguished academic past is forgotten.
@8bagels Duke wasn’t ranked in 1983 it has been in the top 10 ever since though.
In the 1990 US News & World Report of America’s best colleges (selected samples):
Ranked/Acceptance Rate:
1 Harvard 18%
2 Stanford 18%
6 MIT 30%
7 Duke 25%
11 Univ. of Chicago 45%
13 Univ. of Penn 41%
13 UC Berkeley 37%
15 John Hopkins 48%
17 UCLA 43%
21 Univ. of Mich. 60%
22 Carnegie Mellon 64%
23 Northwestern 47%,
24 Washington Univ. 54%
In the next quartile (#26 to 50, no ranked order, selected samples):
Emory 55% acceptance rate
NYU 52% acceptance rate
UC San Diego 55% acceptance rate
UC Davis 69% acceptance rate
Univ. of Notre Dame 34%
USC 74%
Univ. of Washington 65%
Univ. of Wisconsin 72%
Vanderbilt University 58%
USC and some private schools (Northwestern, Wash. Univ., Emory, Notre Dame, and Vanderbilt) have come a long way from 1990 to where they are today.
In the 1990 survey, USC was within the top 50 and to put things in perspective, other notable top 50 universities also had high acceptance rates.