USC in top 20 most accessible elite schools for low-income students
Turns out we’re not actually the University of Spoiled Children after all
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that a new study found that the University of Southern California ranks as the 15th most accessible elite university for low and middle-income students, with over a fifth of the student body hailing from the country’s lowest 60 percent of earners and 13.9 percent coming from the top one percent of earners.
In addition, the Equality of Opportunity study found that USC has a majority success rate, meaning that 54.6 percent of students with parents in the bottom quintile of earners will enter the top quintile of earners in their own lifetime. Of the over 2,000 colleges analyzed in the study, the average success rate was a mere 19.6 percent.
Led by the world famous microeconomist Raj Chetty of Stanford University, John Friedman of Brown University and Nathaniel Hendren of Harvard University, the study aggregated millions of tax returns from anonymous students born between 1980 and 1991. A minor oversight of this method, specifically as it pertains to USC, is that it ignores international students, who comprise nearly a quarter of the student body.
Topping the list of accessibility was a certain public school across town, with 19.2 of their student body coming from the country’s lowest 40 percent of earners, while USC has 11.6 percent.
Our acceptance rate is still 1.5 percent lower than theirs. Just saying.