<p>It actually seems bizarre that SeattleTW continues to talk about the current USC experience and he hasn’t been a student on campus since the 1980’s and apparently lives 1000 miles away. He also appears obsessed with the prestige, rankings, etc of his undergraduate college. I find it interesting for someone who is in his 50’s. As a current undergraduate student I can say that the size of SC feels just right. There is wonderful diversity on campus and so many groups and organizations. I have had classes with 4, 7, 11, 21 and 30 students as well as a few larger lectures. My professors have been available and willing to help.<br>
SeattleTW also has issues with transfer students. I am a transfer student who is on the Dean’s List and am working with one of my professors next year on her research project. She asked me to apply and I was chosen from a number of very qualified applicants.
I don’t even want to think of where SeattleTW is going with his latest comment about international students but whoever reads this please know that we are a student body who embraces people of all races, sexual orientations and nationalities.</p>
<p>^ SeattleTW is obviously a proud alum and likely enjoys the additional cache a USC degree now confers. He’d like to see it considered among the upper echelons of higher education vs. in the 1980s when USC was considered the “University of Second Choice” or “University of Scholastic Compromise”. </p>
<p>Lol Katie does have a point although I’m not quite that old. I like my buddies have been tracking our respective schools ever since US News debuted, and it is addictive to a point. Yes, it’s kind of cool having younger people in particular say, “wow, great school!” when asking about my class ring. And in my profession schools do matter. But seriously my focus is on the college and I want to make it smaller and more intimate. If I had my druthers, USC would be 9,999 undergrads tops. I would bet not one USC undergrad in that environment would complain about its smaller size. The kids at HYSP certainly don’t. Trust me too, in several years, Katie, you will still care about the place, and will, perhaps, appreciate the fact it’s still smaller than a public college.</p>
<p>Duke, as an example of a march to become an academic powerhouse? </p>
<p>Seattle the point is simply that your perspective is outdated, and where you differ from a lot of people on here is that you went to USC for LAS / Dornsife, which I most certainly would not have. I would only have gone to USC for the film school. Otherwise in my case I would’ve gone to Berkeley or the University of Chicago as an English major. Even within Los Angeles, it’s UCLA that has the superior poli sci department, while USC has a fantastic (usually top 3) program in international relations. Outside of the medical school, LAS has always been the weakest part of USC.</p>
<p>Beyond that, as a lawyer schools only matter coming out of school. You might notice that within the actual profession, many of the best attorneys attended no name schools while there are plenty of painfully mediocre, by the book attorneys with fancy degrees. School is overrated (particularly with the ridiculous cost nowadays) and if past the age of 35 all you can talk about is where you went to school, then you haven’t done much professionally.</p>
<p>BTW to go back to the original poster’s question, I agree with a lot of the comments made. USC has always had pockets of excellence but the previous president Dr. Sample’s legacy is in building excellence much more across the board. Nearly all of USC’s professional schools rank in the top 20 (save for the medical school) and many rank in the top 5 - film, theater, comm, accounting, etc. The real game changer will be the university’s current $6 billion fundraising campaign, which at its outset was the largest in higher ed history (naturally Harvard had to top us, and its current campaign goal is $6.5 billion) and is over halfway funded with more than half of a decade to go.</p>
<p>The big picture is that USC is in the right place at the right time. The locus of economic activity in the world has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific as the Far East is rising dramatically economically, militarily, and culturally, while much of Europe (outside of Germany) is in relative decline. America itself is at a crossroads. But all you need to know about REAL economic activity nowadays (not credit default swap B.S. on Wall Street) is that the largest container ports in the world now are Hong Kong, Singapore, and Los Angeles / Long Beach.</p>
<p>In the meantime, here’s some food for thought which drew some controversy in the New York Times - Stanford is (and has been for a bit now) now more selective on the undergraduate level than Harvard. Remember that student selectivity is only part of the equation and that rankings and reputation take time to change, which is part of why USC’s dramatic rise in the last 20 years has been shocking within the world of higher ed.</p>
<p><a href=“Riding Technology Wave, Stanford Rises to Top of Some Measures - The New York Times”>http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/30/education/americas-it-school-look-west-harvard.html</a></p>
<p>Also, I don’t care much for Seattle’s focus on HPY and I’m surprised he would include S on that list. He’s an establishment guy - lawyer obsessed with degrees and rankings. Part of what’s made Stanford great is that the school was in the Wild West and had Leland Stanford’s money, so they could build the school and create the startup culture that now defines Silicon Valley, with a character that is vastly different from its East Coast counterparts. Meanwhile, schools like HPY are really ultimately focused on feeding students into the Establishment. If you want to be a banker on Wall Street (Wharton) or a bureaucrat in the State Department (Harvard’s Kennedy School, Georgetown School of Foreign Service, Johns Hopkins’ program in whatever, etc.), then establishment East Coast schools are for you. But what I love is that the West Coast is inventing the future - witness all the tech companies coming out of Stanford and Berkeley, while USC owns Hollywood and owns a large portion of the video game industry now too. It’s no surprise that the most dynamic parts of the American economy are located on the opposite end of the continent from Washington, just like many of the people who’ve made money in California graduated from East Coast establishment schools and then decamped for California, taking their East Coast connections with them.</p>
<p>My one note to a lot of the kids reading this is that my experiences in Hollywood now for 10+ years are that half of the people graduated with honors from Harvard while the other half never finished high school, and you can guess which batch is more successful.</p>
<p>It’s funny how you say my concern about USC’s growing size in relation to my experience is outdated. I call it wisdom. LAS opened the doors to a few top law schools so I have no regrets about my choice. To others who are seriously considering going to a top professional school, I say if you do well at USC those doors will also open to you as they did to me and several others back in the day. In that fundamental respect USC has not changed. All in all I enjoyed my four years at USC; after all, working hard and having fun is what college is all about at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Seattle, the idea that LAS “opened the doors to a few top law schools” is nothing new. One friend of mine who just finished clerking for a Supreme Court justice did his undergrad at a small state school in Missouri. Another friend of mine went to Yale Law out of a smaller state school in Illinois.</p>
<p>EVERY student at USC is “considering going to a top professional school” nowadays because undergrad isn’t enough anymore. It’s just the basics, although at USC the strong professional emphasis makes it a great place to start. Meanwhile, Dornsife is the weakest part of the university apart from the medical school, and the idea that anyone would go there for a poli sci degree, unless they were taken by USC more generally, is ridiculous. UCLA has the best political science department in town, although of course USC’s international relations program is top 3, so one more time USC and UCLA have rival and overlapping programs.</p>
<p>Nowadays if you knew ahead of time that you wanted to major in X, you could find all sorts of departmental rankings for X and every related major. People don’t necessarily go to a school nowadays just for the school itself, but for a specific program. The higher you go, the more likely you are to encounter excellence across the board (what USC is currently pursuing), although of course even almighty Harvard is relatively mediocre (top 20) in much of engineering and the hard sciences.</p>
<p>You can call your experiences wisdom all you want, but when you define the undergraduate experience at USC nowadays partly in terms of attending football games, you demonstrate how disconnected you are from reality. A friend of mine was at a conference recently where Pat Hayden spoke and he said that they have all sorts of trouble filling the Coliseum on game days now because so many of the students DON’T CARE ABOUT FOOTBALL. Meanwhile, programs like Visions and Voices and What Matters to Me and Why are enormously popular. The latter was started by 2 of my classmates. In the meantime, in my case, I played football all the way through school (grade school through high school) as did both of my brothers and we were both sick of it halfway through our senior years of high school. My team was ranked 6th in the nation in my senior year and you might notice that the smarter the kid, the more generally he/she has less interest in brute physical sports.</p>
<p>Only 6th?</p>