<p>And does USC have a good program for students who would like to major in Economics?</p>
<p>Northwestern is more selective and has a better reputation, but if you live in SoCal and plan on staying there, USC will serve you just as well.</p>
<p>Northwestern had much better rep</p>
<p>Why do you ask? Is that how you measure the quality?</p>
<p>this year’s acceptance statistics taken from this thread</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/481806-regular-decision-competitive-schools-2012-statistics-showing-up-7.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/481806-regular-decision-competitive-schools-2012-statistics-showing-up-7.html</a></p>
<p>Others:</p>
<p>Stanford: 9%
MIT: 11.6%
Swarthmore: 15%
Georgetown: 18%
Bowdoin: 18%
Duke: 18.8%
USC: 21%
JHU: 22%
Vanderbilt: 23%
Vassar: 24%
Emory: 25%
Northwestern:25%
Tufts: 25%
Chicago: 28%
Barnard: 28%
Amherst 14.2
Swarthmore 15.0
Williams 16.3
Middlebury 18.3
Bowdoin 18.4
Pomona 15%</p>
<p>Oh wow I didn’t know USC’s admit rate was that low.</p>
<p>From collegeboard.com (2011 stats)
USC
Admit rate: 25%
SAT Critical Reading: 620 - 720<br>
SAT Math: 650 - 740
SAT Writing: 640 - 720<br>
ACT Composite: 28 - 32 </p>
<p>Northwestern
Admit rate: 27%
SAT Critical Reading: 670 - 750<br>
SAT Math: 680 - 770<br>
SAT Writing: 660 - 750<br>
ACT Composite: 30 - 34</p>
<p>Northwestern is by far the superior school student body-wise, but like I said before, I had no idea USC had that low an acceptance rate. Maybe its just this year though.</p>
<p>Actually USC is very popular these days in California which has a huge population; this makes the size of applicant pool pretty big for popular schools like USC. UCLA had like 50,000 applicants and San Diego State had over 60,000 applicants this year.</p>
<p>USC gets tons of applications from unqualified students, whereas far fewer people apply to Northwestern that honestly have very little chance of getting in. This can be attributed to the huge football program at USC and the allure of the SoCal location (which is about a mile away from my HS and in the middle of a heavily polluted, congested city…it’s actually a terrible location for a school, in my opinion, even though the L.A. area itself is pretty amazing). Northwestern doesn’t attract the sports fans as much, and they also use the waitlist less than many other top universities, making their admit rate higher (i.e. They received 5000 additional applications this year but accepted roughly the same percentage of students, since they figured that the increase in applicants would simply result in a decrease in matriculation yield; if they had accepted the same number of students as last year, their admit rate would be in the upper teens instead of at 25.)</p>
<p>Northwestern is clearly a better school. From personal experience, the students at USC are generally not very intellectual. There exists an elite group of USC students, though, who I’m sure are comparable to the top students at Northwestern. But if you’re talking about the overall campus atmosphere, Northwestern’s is much more intellectual and geared for success I’d say.</p>
<p>@Sam Lee
SDSU got 49,735 freshman applications. UCLA got 55,369 freshman applications.
Sorry for nitpicking :)</p>
<p>Northwestern, save for some niches like film</p>
<p>Northwestern is more prestigious, attracts better students, and is harder to get into. USC is in a bad area of Los Angeles. I’d definitely choose Northwestern given the choice.</p>
<p>northwestern</p>
<p>Northwestern University. USC and Northwestern compete with different schools for their accepted applicants. Overlap schools (from Fiske’s list compiled 3 years ago): USC overlaps= UCLA, UCSD, Berkeley, NYU, Stanford & Michigan. Northwestern overlaps= Stanford, Duke, Cornell, Penn & Michigan. Two thirds of the USC undergraduate studentbody are from California. 25% of students at Northwestern are from Illinois. (Post #10 is interesting. Air pollution remains as a significant problem in the Los Angeles area according to a report released about two weeks ago.) Overlap schools according to 2007 edition of PR’s Best 361 Colleges: Northwestern overlaps= Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford & Chicago. USC overlaps= Stanford, Penn, NYU, Northwestern, Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, Vanderbilt & Johns Hopkins.</p>
<p>Northwestern.. just from looking at all the kids that got in there and USC the the couple years at my HS</p>
<p>Also it may be easier for out-of-state (non- California) applicants to get admitted to USC since two thirds of this private school’s students are from California. Northwestern University has more out-of-state applicants.</p>
<p>Well according to stats USC.</p>
<p>i was waitlisted at northwestern and denied from usc…but i still think northwestern has a stronger student body, overall. i also think their applicant pool is more self-selective than usc’s. but that’s just what i think…</p>
<p>^^ wow.. i would think it would be the other way around</p>