USC is clearly better and even ranks higher than some of the schools currently on the list. C’mon, CC…
Reputation always lags reality, and that’s certainly the case with USC. The school is in the top 10 for Niche’s rankings, so that ought to tell you differently. USC is the total package (true of all of the Big 4 schools in California - Stanford, Berkeley, USC, and UCLA) with great academics, great sports, and a great campus life. This has been an issue with College Confidential for a long while, so perhaps at some point the dinosaurs who run this website will get in touch with reality. I’m sure they all think that China is still a poor, rural, agrarian country too.
USC costs money to most of the average applicants who can’t afford to go there. People don’t recommend it for students who won’t be getting merit aid.
Not to offend anyone, there are many non Ivy League private colleges (not including the tradition academic powerhouses of Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, Northwestern, Chicago, Duke, Wash. Univ. in St. Louis, etc.) on the list of top CC Colleges. They are Notre Dame, Emery, Vanderbilt, Georgetown, Rice, Univ. of Virginia, etc. USC has the football image from the 60’s and 70’s that it still shaking off. It takes time and decades. If more Nobel Prize winners come out of USC, that will help immensely.
Notre Dame is known for football and Georgetown for basketball and I don’t recall any Nobel Prize winners affiliated with those schools. Yet they are in the top CC Colleges. USC should be that same mold.
No offense, but this thread needs some better arguments. Which school on CC’s list should USC replace? Why? What are the criteria? Please don’t use something like Niche ratings; ratings in general might make sense but cherrypicking is not very persuasive.
Here’s the latest 2016 Times World Ranking …
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/2016/world-ranking#!/page/0/length/-1
Stanford, UCB, UCLA all in Top-20s.
USC came in at No. 68, which can be viewed as mediocre.
Yet Notre Dame(No. 108),
Emory(No. 90),
Vanderbilt(No. 87),
Georgetown(No 94),
Rice(No 101),
Univ. of Virginia(No. 147),
are all below No. 68.
Rankings always vary according to metric. It’s a question of what you value. Our country’s flagship state universities usually score quite well in global rankings of research because they are research powerhouses, but they’re not necessarily the best place to go and get an undergraduate degree because they have large class sizes, classes taught by graduate students rather than professors, and the fancy top professors who give the schools their reputations almost never teach anything anywhere. Even then, the state flagships have a lot of the best business schools, engineering schools, medical schools, etc. which isn’t necessarily the case at private schools, even top private schools. Again, it’s a question of what you value.
This is still the most honest evaluation I’ve found - from the Chronicle of Higher Education (inside baseball guide for higher education in America) which asked schools to name their peer institutions. The mutual matches (each school listed the other) for USC were:
Brandeis
NYU
Northwestern
Syracuse
U of Rochester
Vanderbilt
Washington University St. Louis
http://chronicle.com/article/Peers-Interactive-Data/134262/
That seems fair - nearly all schools one notch below (on a thousand point scale, of course) the Ivy League.
By contrast, Harvard’s mutual matches were Yale and Princeton, although 25 different schools claimed Harvard as a peer, including the Regent University and the University of Phoenix’s Jersey City campus. Yeah right.
CC is not a ranking, please get over it. USC is a great college and is equal to or above many of CC’s top colleges. Nonetheless, the only problem I have is that it’s a bit harder to navigate the app to get to USC, that’s it. Also, at least on the West Coast, USC is a top five college (Stanford, USC, Cal, UCLA and Cal Tech).
Not this again.
Apparently there are “certain people” here who have been negative towards USC regardless of how strong a University it is (not East Coast school, reputation from 1950, etc).
If USC were to join the Ivy League, make the top 3 in all rankings, have 5 more Nobel Prize winners, and provide free tuition to everyone, “certain people” would still not list it as a Top College.
Don’t hold your breath.
Just enjoy the phenomenal school that it is.
You are joking right?
Caltech considers FIT as a peer? LOL.
MIT and Wellesley? Sure, if you don’t get into MIT, you would of course go study engineering or physics at Wellesley.
On which planet is that true?
Go back and look at the mutual matches again.
Caltech’s mutual matches - each school chose the other - are Carnegie-Mellon, MIT, Rice, and the University of Chicago. Those are all respectable. You are looking at which schools chose Caltech as a peer, not the mutual matches - of course there are laughable mismatches like FIT.
But it’s a start. I wouldn’t expect any one ranking or evaluation to be all-inclusive, which is what some people seem to want. This is the same concept as boiling intelligence down to the elusive concept of “G.”
BTW mutual matches for MIT:
Caltech
Carnegie-Mellon
Cornell
Stanford
Yale
All seem fair to me.
I think that cc has not changed that list in a long time. I probably just needs to be updated.
^ good luck with that…
“updating” wont happen until the cows come home or as long as the founders of CC / aka D.B. has a say. …
CC posters have been waiting for 10 long years for an “update” …
Can any USC supporter give solid evidence as to why they should be top ten? I feel like there is definitely a top 20 school that they can replace.
Y’all are overthinking this…they just haven’t bothered to change it in a while
a WHILE? HA!
I’ve been on CC since 2004- 11 years!- and it hasn’t changed one bit.
It wont either, as long as the people who made the original decision regarding USC, based on its reputation from 20 + yrs ago, are still calling the shots.
USC offer full scholarships to students who can prove that they cannot pay for the tuition. If you are under 26 and your parents make a healthy income then they assume your parents are good parents and would love the chance to support their child at one of the best schools in Southern California if not the world. World leaders have come to USC to find our fighting spirit. Maybe they expect you to find yours here as well.
In my D’s case, and now from my younger D’s perspective, there were/are really only 5 colleges in the mix in terms of where they each wished to attend: USC, Stanford, Brown, Yale, Princeton. There were scores of factors involved in considering each college and ranking it as among their personal “top five”. Understandably, everyone has their own individual criteria in making such selections.
For them, USC had the following going for it… Niche ranking (#10) - this was especially important as its driven by student/alumni reviews, U.S. News and World Report’s ranking (#23), Hollywood Reporter’s ranking of SCA (its film school #1) and drama school (top ten), 101 NCAA national championships (and resulting school spirit/pride related to athletics), more Olympic medalists than any other college in the world, more majors/minors offered than at any other U.S. college, more student organizations than at any other U.S. college, its greek life, its campus, more international students enrolled than at any other U.S. college, its location in Los Angeles (near Hollywood), it status as a private vs. public institution, its nearly $5B endowment, the Trojan Mafia (SCA Alumni) - which includes more Oscar winners than any other college in the world… and key players in the world of film/tv/entertainment like George Lucas & the heads of Marvel, Disney, etc. The other alum lists are also truly staggering… from the current Heads of State in Japan and South Korea to Neil Armstrong to John Wayne, etc.
D1 attends there now and loves it, and D2 will be applying in the fall, with USC SCA as her #1 choice.
I cannot speak to CC’s logic in not considering USC a top tier college, but it certainly is one. As a USC parent and JHU alum, I now clearly rank USC as top ten without question… and far ahead of many of the colleges that CC equates as somehow superior. But again, that is merely my take and my family’s. Everyone is free to rank as they see fit…
Here’s hoping that CC reads this and makes the overdue change 