USC Media and Public Relations

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The Chronicle of Higher Education featured a study by Tatiana Melguizo of the USC Rossier School and a colleague, finding that minority college students who majored in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields and took jobs related to their degrees earned at least 50 percent more on average than classmates who majored in humanities or education. However, disparities in pay existed between different racial groups with STEM degrees. If America is "failing to provide opportunities to continue into STEM fields, that's a big loss for society, the institutions, and the individual," Melguizo said. The research was also covered by KPCC-FM.

The Chronicle of Higher Education highlighted predictions by Judith "Jack" Halberstam of the USC Dornsife College that the culture's changing attitudes toward sex and emotional connections will lead to new, alternative forms of marriage. "Marriage might have been OK back when people died at the age of 45, but nowadays, 'till death do us part' is a lot harder," Halberstam said. She predicts that the future will see a rise of different kinship structures like queer families and community parenting.

Curbed L.A. reported that the Eli and Edythe Broad Center for Regenerative Medicine and Stem Cell Research at USC won the Sustainability Award in the L.A. Business Council's Los Angeles Architectural Awards. A second Curbed L.A. story reported that USC students Bryn Garrett, Samantha Ng and Evan Shieh won the Julius Shulman Emerging Talent Award for their design "Urban Cascade."

NPR's "All Things Considered" featured work by Chris Kyriakakis of the USC Viterbi School, who studies how music systems are affected by the room around them. Kyriakakis, founding director of USC's Immersive Audio Lab, has developed software that compensates for the ways in which walls, floors and ceilings change sound. "It's called room distortion," Kyriakakis said. "We set out to figure out — first of all — how to measure it, how to quantify it, and then is there something we can do about it to fix those kind of problems."

The Huffington Post ran a column by Nicholas Warner of the USC Dornsife College about an interview he gave to a journalism student. After describing a bleak distant future for both humanity and the universe, the student asked what science could do to help guide people. Warner wrote that though he's an atheist, he found himself thinking of a friend's Buddhist philosophies. "Decrease suffering," he told the student. "All science can do is decrease the suffering of all species, not just humans, as we face and try to handle future calamities."

NBC News Los Angeles affiliate KNBC-TV ran a column by Sherry Bebitch Jeffe of the USC Price School about moderates in the Californian Republican Party. She noted that several Republican figures recently became independents because they didn't feel that the party represented their perspective. "In a political system so partisan that even reforms explicitly designed to embrace the middle prove difficult, there appears to be little room for moderate Republicans," she wrote.

Truthdig ran a column by Richard Reeves of the USC Annenberg School about the role immigrants have played in the United States. Immigration has driven America's success, Reeves wrote, and in return the country has offered immigrants new opportunities. "It's win-win," he added. Reeves noted that USC has the most international students of any university in the country.