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THE 2001 EDITION of the Newsweek/Kaplan How To Get Into College guide has chosen USC as one of America’s nine “hottest schools.”
Editors of the annual guidebook, published Aug. 7, said they chose USC because it lives up to its reputation as a top-notch institution of higher education.
“Just as East Coast students go for New York and NYU, the West Coast
is gravitating to USC in Los Angeles,” Newsweek reporters John Schwartz and Nadine Joseph wrote in a four-page article that highlighted USC and eight other institutions. “USC has morphed from a jock school to a serious contender for top students,” the article said.
Other universities designated “hot schools” include New York University, Northwestern University, Washington University (St. Louis) and Rice Univer-sity – all private research universities. Also named were Miami of Ohio, Kansas State, the Rhode Island School of Design and the Claremont Colleges.
Newsweek/Kaplan’s selection of USC as the school-of-choice for some of the brightest students in the country comes on the heels of the university’s selection last year as “College of the Year 2000” by Time magazine and Princeton Review.
USC PRESIDENT Steven B. Sample attributes some of this momentum to the university’s focus, in recent years, on the undergraduate experience – in particular, finding ways to give students access to the most outstanding faculty.
“The faculty are a great strength of USC, as are our highly ranked professional schools,” Sample says. “We are finding ways to engage students early on, not only with our best faculty, but also through programs that encourage them to take intellectual risks, to cross boundaries of discipline, to take courses in widely separated majors and minors.”
INCOMING FRESHMAN quoted in the Newsweek article said Los Angeles’ ethnic diversity, the offer of scholarships, the small classroom sizes and USC’s standing in academe were qualities that attracted them to the university.
For instance, although her parents wanted her to attend school on the East Coast, Alexis Pankey, 17, of Olathe, Kansas, said one visit to the University Park Campus persuaded her to accept nothing less than the best. “Seeing the campus was the deciding factor,” Pankey said in the article.
Mariana Blanco of Norman, Okla., said she picked USC over Dartmouth, Northwestern and NYU because of her acceptance into USC’s engineering program. She was most impressed with the way a large, urban school retains its human touch. “Students called to answer my questions even before I was accepted,” Blanco told the reporters.
Newsweek noted that USC has seen its undergraduate applications almost double over the last few years. “USC received 12,200 applications in 1997,” the article said. “Now it’s more than 21,000.”
The students submitting these applications are savvy shoppers who know what they want out of their education, dean of admissions Joe Allen believes.
“They’re true consumers, who spend much more effort and time in making college choices,” he says.
The Plane Truth
If you’re disturbed by the string of unexplained air disasters involving TWA, EgyptAir, Alaska Air and Air France carriers, brace yourself for more unsolved mysteries. Aviation safety expert Michael Barr expects investigations into future crashes to be similarly inconclusive.
“As the airplane business has matured, all the kinds of accidents you can have [already] have occurred, and we’ve done the engineering fixes along the way,” Barr recently told USA Today. What remains are mostly freaks and flukes. “You’re really almost down to one-of-a-kind occurrences,” Barr says.
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