When will USC break into the top 20

Colleges and Universities A-Z University of Southern California
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<p>Also, I’m with you that for better and for worse the college (Dornsife) is the heart of the university but I don’t think that that is precisely the baseline focus of the school. I think that that’s undergraduate education, regardless of school or discipline.</p>

<p>Secondly, the reputation of the institution and of graduate programs does not depend solely on the quality of the undergraduate student body or of the college specifically. A lot of that depends very heavily on RESEARCH and that’s fairly independent of teaching and specifically undergraduate teaching (much more so doctoral teaching), and it’s also ranked MUCH differently than the usual U.S. News undergrad rankings. You have the Shanghai Jiao Tong rankings, the Times Higher Education rankings, the Center for Measuring University Effectiveness (?), Washington Monthly, etc. Those are all specialized rankings that carry much more weight within the academic community and are largely unknown outside of it.</p>

<p>Here’s a good snapshot from the Chronicle of Higher Education. CHE asked schools to list their peers and while EVERY school thinks that Harvard is its peer, Harvard only selected Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. The schools that enjoyed mutual recognition with USC were Brandeis, NYU, Northwestern, Syracuse, Rochester, Vanderbilt, and Wash U. Not surprising.</p>

<p>[Who</a> Does Your College Think Its Peers Are? - Administration - The Chronicle of Higher Education](<a href=“http://chronicle.com/article/Who-Does-Your-College-Think/134222/]Who”>Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?)</p>

<p>That kind of stuff matters INTERNALLY a lot more than U.S. News does.</p>

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<p>Allow me to redirect the conversation to something a little more insightful and productive…</p>

<p>WHAT does the USC board need to do to push us into the top 20? Or rather more ambitiously, to hell with the top 20, what will make us seen as the “Stanford” of LA? We’re practically discussing that topic anyway, but I wanted to formally ask the various participants of this thread and forum what we need to do. I’m a freshman here at USC and honestly I’m in love with the university so I often think about what’s going on behind the scenes and what’s changing.</p>

<p>Two issues I’ve identified:

  1. We’re still on an upward rise, especially with us entering the common app last year, there are more and more applicants and the quality of student is still going up. So we’ve gained (from what I can tell of what USC’s rep used to be, A LOT OF) ground, but there’s still a ways to go which will simply take time.</p>

<p>2) The matter of reputation in general – I have peers in my class that chose USC over Berkeley, UCLA, U Chicago, hell even Stanford and Harvard (I do just love to brag about that). So in all honesty, I feel like the student body is rapidly catching up to that that you might see at Stanford. But there seems to be this lingering shadow of the past that hangs over USC, because we’re a school on the rise we don’t have the same legacy as other schools and for that, we’re not seen in the same light.</p>

<p>Anyway, I’m curious as to what other possible problems and solutions people have. Of course I’m not here to try to actually boss the board of trustees around, but many of you seem to be pretty experienced with the concept of an improving USC and maybe had some insight. I’m purely curious.</p>

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<p>To move into the next level, USC needs to make drastic changes, perhaps over time, but regardless, it must make a paradigm shift to join the top 20. </p>

<p>First, USC has the infrastructure – including physical plant, breath of majors, breath of graduate and professional schools, and athletic history – to rival HYPS and other top schools. Unlike the Ivy League, USC is not stuck in a hierarchy that defines the Ivies. For example, there is no chance that Cornell, Brown or Penn would ever achieve HYPS status; history is against them. Unless you get into HYPS, you might as well to USC, ND, Vandy or Rice over the other inferior Ivies. On the other hand, USC could conceivably surpass Cornell, Penn and Brown in the rankings. Dartmouth is harder to predict because it’s more of a college in characteristics. We also have the great California sunshine and weather on our side. USC’s location is also a plus and likely accounts for why USC was the ONLY school outside of HYSP that made both the parents’ and students’ list of top “dream schools” last year. </p>

<p>USC’s largest impediment to moving into the top tier is our very modest endowment, which stands at number 22 among all universities. In fact, with few exceptions, there is a direct correlation between endowment size and the USN&WR ranking. If USC is successful in this latest endowment campaign, we should be able to increase our endowment (presently at $3.5B) to around $6.5 billion, which will take us up a few notches, all else being equal. To meet our ambitious goals, I recommend we target wealthy parents whose children have gone to USC, even if the parents have no other connection with the school. There are several quite famous families who have children who have attended and/or graduated from USC. They are an untapped resource, IMO.</p>

<p>USC’s second largest handicap is its size. We have over 17,000 undergraduates, and that number has actually increased since the 1970s. (During the 1980s, we had about 16,000.) By contrast, Cornell, the largest of the Ivies, has about 14,000 undergrads. USC currently is larger than Cal, including our graduate students (38,010 vs. 35,899). USC will never climb into the top 20 with such large numbers, especially if we want to be considered counterparts of HYSP. I recommend shaving the size of our classes to around 2,000 per class (8,000 total), with another 2,000 transfers, for a total number of 10,000 at any time. The corresponding drop in revenue would need to be offset with higher endowment income, fewer staff and faculty, more graduate students, and a smaller menu of course offerings. We cannot be the Costco (i.e., UCLA) of privates, which is where Nikias appears to be taking us. (Norman Topping, the President of USC during the 1960s (and arguably the finest president we have had in the 20th century), tried cutting the class size (to mirror Stanford’s) with little success, largely because we had virtually no endowment at the time and it was financially unfeasible.) Because of our strong physical plant and infrastructure, trimming the size of our undergraduate student body will be relatively easy, while dropping our admit rate to around 15 percent, if not lower. That alone will propel us into the top 20.</p>

<p>Finally, and this is more long term, we do need another Norman Topping as president; i.e., someone who has graduated from the college (Topping was USC undergrad/M.D. and Penn VP) and a top ranked university. Chris Cox, the former Chairman of the SEC (USC-Harvard MBA) comes to mind. USC has several graduates who attended elite grad and professional schools. While I admire the John Sextons (i.e., president of NYU) of the world, USC will need less of a salesman and more of an academic (or at least academic pedigree) as its next president. I encourage all high achieving USC undergrads to go to a top grad or professional school (as did I) to enhance our breadth of well-educated alumni. We are all USC ambassadors, and USC needs more of us to enhance our brand name among the nation’s top grad and professional schools and beyond. So, as the saying goes, get your USC degrees, go forth and multiply!</p>

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<p>Apologies as I’ve been very busy with work lately and jotted down some thoughts a few days ago and wanted to pass them along. I don’t know that Seattle and I are that far apart, actually.</p>

<p>Alpha priorities (inseparable and indistinguishable):</p>

<p>1) Endowment</p>

<p>USC needs more money in the bank, period. The school is too dependent on tuition revenue right now which means that it can’t act spontaneously and buy people/properties it finds attractive. Even with the endowment that it has, much of that comes in the form of restricted gifts, meaning that it’s money that counts towards the overall number but can only be spent on X special pet project of X wealthy donor.</p>

<p>Likewise, the endowment is particularly small when compared to other schools. USC is too darn large, period, and when you stretch $3 billion over 37,000 students it goes a lot less farther than does $3 billion stretched over 10,000 students. I really don’t see why the school had to grow beyond 30,000 students (was already plenty big at that point, IMHO) as that seems to have only exacerbated the issues the university already had with parking, housing, lines at the beginning of the semester, etc.</p>

<p>2) Housing / neighborhood / safety and security:</p>

<p>Always an issue, made worse by recent events. As the university continues to grow academically that means that it will continue to attract more and more students with fewer and fewer ties to the region (only 47% of students now are from CA and I’m sure it’d be even less if you only counted SoCal or even the LA/OC/IE area) and those students will all need to be housed somewhere. USC is nowhere near being able to guarantee housing for all 4 years to undergrads (not as much an issue for grad students) and, frankly, it can’t be a top 5 school if it’s in any way whatsoever a commuter school.</p>

<p>The big problem with the campus the way it is is that cost alone is already a barrier to students applying (and you want the best applying, period) but to then have campus safety be another red flag is a huge, huge, huge problem. I’ve met parents in the last few years who will not let their kids apply to USC for any reason whatsoever, no matter how fantastic the school or a particular program may be, because they are afraid to put their kids on that campus. That’s huge. From a safety perspective the school needs to fix things as best it can, and from a marketing perspective, it needs to eliminate as many barriers as it can, both real and perceived, to students applying to the school.</p>

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<p>Second rung priorities:</p>

<p>1) Medical school:</p>

<p>The thing is a drag on the whole rest of the university. The medical campus is on the other side of town, painfully in the shadow of UCLA (top 30-35 versus top 5), hospitals are dispersed throughout the city, university has had lawsuits back and forth with Tenet (company that used to run the hospitals with the university), and, frankly, just needs to get its act together, period. This is one more great irony between USC and UCLA - the rich private school is in the ghetto and the public school is in the nice neighborhood, and the rich private school is stuck running the lousy county hospital while the public school has the world-class private medical center. If you look at the rankings, UCLA may have 30 (??) specialties ranked in the top 10 while USC would be lucky to have 5. Don’t know the exact numbers but the difference is that bad.</p>

<p>2) Research</p>

<p>USC’s professional schools are great, but being cited in things like law and business and accounting is not the same as discovering a gene or a new cancer treatment. That’s the kind of hard science research that garners the real praise and the real dollars - as it should, IMHO. I like my own field, film, but a small but fancy professional school is not the same as having world-class scientists at the very cutting edge. This is a strong corollary to the medical school, of course. USC has a big opportunity with the CA stem cell research initiative and the continued backslide of the UCs to be able to move forward in this field, as its real competition going forward (of course) is Stanford, but we still can’t forget about Caltech, UCLA, and UCSF.</p>

<p>3) Excellence across the board:</p>

<p>USC is very angular towards the arts, humanities, and professions, but otherwise when you look at the programs that it has that every other school has (business, English, law, engineering, etc.) the university is generally top 20 but not top 5. In order for USC to attain “undisputed elite status” (Dr. Nikias’ term, and a very good one), USC has to have undisputed elite status across the board. USC is elite in many of the programs germane to Southern California (like film) but for things like business and law it’s “in the pack” or “a member of the club” but a USC degree does not confer the “wow factor” that comes from having a business degree from Wharton or an engineering degree from MIT.</p>

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<p>There is some truth to the above priorities. </p>

<p>At the end of the day the number one priority is money, because with it everything else will follow. </p>

<p>I am starting to feel USC needs to reduce the number of students, but as previously mentioned it is not in the finanical position to do so. USC does have quite a bit of money but we also have goals of greatness and currently we are not there with the current system. </p>

<p>However, I do feel Nikias is on the right track, because I STRONGLY believe that he has a endowment figure in mind (possibly $6.5) at which point we will hit, then he will begin to become more selective and start decreasing on-campus enrollment sharply. </p>

<p>Nikias will possibly fill in some of the gap and fund more student scholarships with funds from USC Now, the online degree programs. </p>

<p>At the end of the day, Nikias current goal is to make the USC campus infrastructure (endowment, buildings, grounds, faculty, research and med center) at the elite level then once that is in place drop enrollment.</p>

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<p>My understanding is that USC borrowed heavily to extricate itself from the medical school fiasco, adversely affecting our bond rating. I’m not happy that we are digging ourselves deeper into a financial hole and taking a step backwards in terms of enrollment…Nikias is a huge gamble.</p>

<p>P.S.: USC had about 26,000 students in total during the 80’s; we are huge!</p>

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<p>My prediction? </p>

<p>Whenever it happens, it will be long before USC ever makes it on CC’s top universities list. Because at this point, that is clearly… never. Silly cc :)</p>

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<p>I don’t think USC borrowed as much as you think… In fact the med school has shown a ton of progress and has been vastly improved and the revenue there has gone way up recently. The main problem right is that USC just doesn’t have an endowment big enough…</p>

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<p>I agree that USC will not make the CC list of top colleges for a few years, at least. We need to convince the publisher that we are going to remain in the top 25 list with US News and World Report for the long run. Correct me if I’m wrong, but we have a lot more traffic than most other colleges on this website.</p>

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<p>Thanks for the wonderful responses everyone. It really has shed some light on the subject for me.</p>

<p>It seems like the biggest issue is money. I wasn’t aware that there was such a disparity of endowment from USC to other top schools. I see that there is a new 6 billion endowment initiative under Nikias – I hope that this does well. It seems ambitious which is excellent. I’m in band so I have to play at the money-raising events and galas and trust me, they happen really frequently.</p>

<p>SeattleTW - you seem critical of Nikias in some aspects. What exactly is he doing that you dislike? He has only been around for a little while, so I’m curious as to what aspects of his direction that you are not on board with. Also, assuming Nikias does not pan out, do you think it is realistic that he would ousted for someone like Topping in the near future? Looking at the historical data, most presidents at USC lasted at least 10 years. Nikias is on year… 2 or 3.</p>

<p>As for student body, I personally agree that USC is not selective enough. Simply put we have a huge student body! I think that reducing student body at some point would be very beneficial for a lot of reasons. I think that if they are planning on doing this it would be great – especially if it’s after reaching that endowment goal, which means probably we’ll be able to be more financially independent from tuition?</p>

<p>Going by pure numbers, I believe that we definitely need to cut admission rates (this is helped by the fact that more and more people are applying to USC) to below 15% in tandem with reducing study body #. Avg. SAT and GPA scores are naturally rising, so that needs to continue. Meanwhile I think that plans like the new University Village are incredibly necessary. Gentrification aside, modernizing the surrounding area of USC is key imo. It will help reduce the stigma. I also agree that we need more excellence across the board. USC has a renowned film and arts school. The business school is excellent. But I feel like we need to emphasize humanities and sciences more. I wish that people would praise our biology or our political sciences programs as much as they did for UCLA and Georgetown respectively. Our computer science should be better than Cal. Our pre-law should be better than Stanford. I know it seems ambitious, but what are we without lofty goals? </p>

<p>As a Freshman at USC, I’m already in love. I hope that I can be successful and give back to the school at some point. As such I’m really interested in the further progress of USC. I personally believe that USC can be the best school ever. The “stanford” of LA, so to speak, and beyond. So hearing all these thoughts and plans about how USC is on the rise makes me so happy.</p>