A totally honest thread...from long long ago

[Football Fan]

To add to JWSteele's comments.....
Recently, I did a report on SC admissions and a survey of their graduate/undergraduate rankings. According to an official at SC who wrote to me it is just as difficult to be admitted to Cal, UCLA or SC. For those of you out of California SC is a smaller private university. UCLA and Cal are much larger and part of the public Univ. of California system.
For information purposes SC had 33,754 applicants for a freshman class of 2964 (2763 last year)entering in 2007. National Merit Scholars were 220 and 5 were National Achievement Scholars. Unweighted GPA of entering freshmen was 3.7.
For this academic year there were 9 Fulbright Scholars, 1 Marshall Scholar and 1 Rhodes Scholar. It has one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation.
If any of you Trojans wish to PM me I have the rankings of most of the graduate and undergraduate programs.

[PeppyGPhiB]

Originally Posted by Football Fan

To add to JWSteele's comments.....
Recently, I did a report on SC admissions and a survey of their graduate/undergraduate rankings. According to an official at SC who wrote to me it is just as difficult to be admitted to Cal, UCLA or SC. For those of you out of California SC is a smaller private university. UCLA and Cal are much larger and part of the public Univ. of California system.
For information purposes SC had 33,754 applicants for a freshman class of 2964 (2763 last year)entering in 2007. National Merit Scholars were 220 and 5 were National Achievement Scholars. Unweighted GPA of entering freshmen was 3.7.
For this academic year there were 9 Fulbright Scholars, 1 Marshall Scholar and 1 Rhodes Scholar. It has one of the most diverse student bodies in the nation.
If any of you Trojans wish to PM me I have the rankings of most of the graduate and undergraduate programs.

When I was in college, it was kindof a joke that USC was for kids that couldn't get into UCLA. But it's not really that way anymore. It has gotten so hard to get into 75% of the UC schools (public) that USC (private) has benefitted from the competition as well. I almost went to USC, but admittedly if I had to apply today with the grades I had in high school, I would probably not get in. And FORGET about UCLA or Cal...you have to split the atom to get in there now. All of the "big name" schools in California - and there are a lot of them - get an insane amount of applications for the small number of spots, meaning they can truly take the cream of the crop. At least with private schools they typically consider a number of other factors beyond gpa and tests, and they generally can be much more subjective in their admissions.

In terms of size, I wouldn't call USC small, though. It's huge compared to my alma mater (3,000 undergrads). It's pretty big for a private university.

[bejazd]

USC really is in a class by itself here as far as being an old, large, private residential university in the heart of the city. With a sticker price of somewhere around $200K for four years living on campus as an undergrad, I pretty much expect that the students there are generally quite serious and studious. I think I read somewhere that less than 2% of USC students receive a "full ride" in scholarships. Even though it's totally unique I think to some extent for Greeks in California, its sort of seen as the "flagship" of the Greek system.

As far as admssions to Cal and UCLA, I think its been pretty difficult to get into either for some time, and it's not much easier to get into any of the other UC schools. According to my son's HS counseler, even if you qualify for admission to UC with the min GPA, ACT/SAT scores, and have taken all the pre-reqs in HS, meaning 4 years of math, 4 years of English, 4 years of science and social science, 3 years of foreign language, the only schools that guarantee admssion are UC Merced and UC Riverside. So that means if you've taken that many academic courses as a HS student you didn't spend a lot of time in HS taking elective courses like drama or art or music. I think that's pretty impressive!

[Football Fan]

According to the website for admissions 60% of SC students receive need based financial aid.
SC requires about the same course requirements as the U.C. system. To apply for the School of Cinematic Arts (1) a film portfolio must be included. The School of Music (5) requires an audition.

SC is smaller compared to some of the bigger public universities such as Ohio State with about 55,000 students or private universities such as NYU and Brigham Young with much larger enrollments.

[TSteven]

Originally Posted by bejazd

Even though it's totally unique I think to some extent for Greeks in California, its [Southern California] sort of seen as the "flagship" of the Greek system.

How so? As in how do you define "flagship"? The reason I ask is that I was under the impression that Greek Life was older and more established at Cal Berkeley.