Antonio Villaraigosa on USC's role in his life and LA.

Colleges & Universities University of Southern California
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<p>[Mayor</a> supports, encourages active USC role in city|Daily Trojan](<a href=“http://dailytrojan.com/2012/09/06/mayor-supports-encourages-active-usc-role-in-city/]Mayor”>Mayor supports, encourages active USC role in city - Daily Trojan)</p>

<p>Some interesting notes about the mayor:</p>

<p>In 1977, Antonio Villaraigosa received a bachelor’s degree in history from UCLA. </p>

<p>In addition to forming a greater professional connection to USC during his tenure, Villaraigosa’s personal connections to the university have also grown. In 2006, the mayor was awarded an honorary doctorate after delivering the university’s commencement address. And last year, Villaraigosa’s ties became even stronger when his daughter began college as a Trojan.</p>

<p>“I hope UCLA wins at everything they play against USC,” Villaraigosa said. “But I’ve changed over the years. Now I’m for ’SC when they play against the world.”</p>

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<p>The mark of a successful man is his ability to send a kid to USC, according to my USC college roomie whose pop also graduated from UCLA.</p>

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<p>that “pops” must be joking. Incredibly easy to get into any college in California besides caltech.</p>

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<p>I know the above poster’s claim is obviously a lie, but I’ll post the top CA universities acceptances rates anyway:</p>

<p>Privates
Stanford 7%
Caltech 13%
USC 18%</p>

<p>Publics
Berkeley 21%
UCLA 22%</p>

<p>LAC
Claremont 12.4%
Pomona 14%
H. Mudd 21%</p>

<p>Obviously CA has extemely competitive schools.</p>

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<p>I’ll have to remember to tak with a grain of salt the posts of Takmuieo.</p>

<p>“I hope UCLA wins at everything they play against USC,” Villaraigosa said. “But I’ve changed over the years. Now I’m for ’SC when they play against the world.”</p>

<p>Swap USC with UCLA and I’m pretty sure that’s the sentiment of every Trojan.</p>

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<p>20% is extremely easy. I dont know where your kids are coming out of high school from to not get that.</p>

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<p>And where exactly are your kids coming out of college? Twenty percent is quite difficult. Five to six percent is insane. It’s done all the time, but, particularly with the current Baby Boomer echo, there are far more qualified applicants, both domestically and worldwide, than there are available slots.</p>

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<p>uh sorry… 20% is really easy. The only schools I will recognize that are difficult to get into are the ones who provide superb education and <10% acceptance rate. You must have kids who cant do well in school for not being able to get into a 20% acceptance school</p>

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<p>This has the possibility of getting rather ugly rather quickly, so let me make a few simple points:</p>

<p>1) I don’t have kids. Look at my screen name and figure it out.</p>

<p>2) You and I undoubtedly have quite different values, definitions of success, and desires in life.</p>

<p>3) I went to USC for the film school (not critical studies) on a partial merit scholarship, thank you very much. Both production and writing have acceptance rates below 10% and the film school as a whole has a yield of around 80%, against the university’s yield of 33-34%. The film school is most definitely NOT the same as the rest of the university.</p>

<p>4) If USC doesn’t provide a “superb” education in film, television, and new media then I don’t know that anyone does. In the meantime, the Hollywood Reporter recently ranked USC’s film school as the best in the world.</p>

<p>5) There are many different rankings and metrics which purport to quantify and rank undergraduate teaching (what I discern you to mean by a “superb” education) and prestige (i.e. the U.S. News rankings) is not the same as quality teaching.</p>

<p>6) Virtually everyone in my extended family has a graduate degree nowadays, most from brand name schools. I don’t know what your metrics are for doing “well” in school are, but brand name degrees and collegiate teaching appointments IMHO are a pretty good start.</p>

<p>7) Most importantly, doing well in school is not the same as doing well in life. The skills that school rewards are not the same as the skills required to succeed in the working world. Evidence of this would be any number of famous people written off in school (Albert Einstein) and the fact that most Fortune 500 CEOs went to state schools, not elite private schools.</p>

<p>8) The friends of mine from school who are most happy and successful are not the ones who had 1600/2400 SATs and 4.0 GPAs. They’re the people for whom film school was a natural extension of who and what they are. Long before film school, they did community theater, school productions, worked for a local TV or radio station, wrote for the school newspaper, wrote their own short stories, directed their own short films, etc. As I said above, success in school is an exceptionally narrow definition of success and the people who obsess over success in school are often grossly underdeveloped in terms of their self-awareness, social skills, and emotional intelligence.</p>

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<p>Obviously I didnt point that generalized statements towards you. But it is a fact that a 20% acceptance rate is an indication of how easy it is to get into that school, and that is my only point. I am not talking about merits and what not as I am well aware that many factors are involved to one’s success in life but I never did mention about how a 20% acceptance rate is correlated to a successful life. I am just simply stating that it is easy to get into a school like USC and you should be able to agree with me on this as well.</p>

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<p>I fail to see how a 20% admit rate means a school is “easy” to get into. I disagree with this point that you are making, and ask to see your evidence.</p>

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<p>20% admit rate is considered most selective by US NEWS. Among schools with a 20% admit rate would be UCLA, USC, Berkeley, Cornell, and Hopkins among others. I think you’re assuming that the applicants with the top SAT scores/ grades will get into all these schools. That’s not the case. It’s not uncommon for an applicant to get admitted to Stanford or some of the ivies and rejected from UCLA. They might reject the potential applicant for any number of reasons.</p>

<p>Additionally you’re reasoning from a false dichotomy. Just because 10% is obviously more selective than 20% doesn’t mean that the latter is easy to get into. It’s basic math dude. A 20% admit rate means they reject 80% of all applicants. In terms of numbers, UCLA rejected around 74.4k applicants last year. That’s more rejections than some universities even get applicants.</p>

<p>The truth is that the vast majority of schools in the US have a 50% or 60% admit rate. So no, contrary to what you believe, 20% is still highly selective.</p>

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<p>Dont feed the ■■■■■.</p>

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<p>Kind of a stupid argument. If you’re a top student 4.0GPA 2300+ SAT who sets his sight on HYPS, then yeah, 20% is relatively easy. If you have middle-of-the-road statistics like most people though, then 20% is well…20%.</p>

<p>Obviously takmu is a very smart person or he’s just pretending to sound like he is.</p>

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<p>Beyphy and Grabbit nailed it. I know some fantastic people who were admitted to the film school. I know some people who, in retrospect, had no business being there. Either way, as was said on other threads, thinking of schools in terms of tiers is perhaps better and more honest than obsessing over the strict numerical hierarchy perpetuated by U.S. News and all the other rankings out there. What matters is simply that you get a degree in your field from a respected institution, as people are admitted and rejected by different schools for all sorts of reasons which may or may not make any sense at all.</p>

<p>Beyond that, I feel sorry for today’s applicants because you have a huge demographic bump competing for a fixed number of slots, making the process that much more competitive. It’s not like it was in the 1970s and early 1980s when universities across the board were worried about having a critical mass of qualified applicants to fill their entering classes, let alone select among qualified applicants to shape the class as they saw fit.</p>