Reminiscing.
When I was going to grad school at USC in the late 80s, it still had its “Spoiled Children” reputation. I knew nothing about that until my mother, who grew up in LA, mentioned it. I still thought of USC as a football school.
It was a good university academically - better than its reputation, although not on the level of Berkeley, UCLA, or even the mid-tiers like Davis or Santa Barbara. At least it was above the CSUs. Among California privates, I would have considered its academic peers to be schools like Santa Clara, University of San Francisco, University of San Diego.
My fellow students were quite intelligent and competent, with many coming from the various military academies. But with a couple of exceptions, I wasn’t all that impressed with the professors or administration. The best professors were the adjuncts who worked full-time and taught part-time.
One day a USC administrator came in to talk to one of our classes about various things administrative (I don’t remember exactly what.) I do remember her mentioning that USC was embarking on a process to to turn itself into the west coast equivalent of MIT, at which point we all started snickering and rolling our eyes.
It’s not quite there yet,and I think it’s using Stanford as a model more than MIT, but damned if USC hasn’t made a lot of progress in that direction. I definitely consider it to be a peer of Berkeley and UCLA now.