<p>USC is very diverse. From what we have seen and discussions with my son I am impressed with not just the diversity at USC but the progress in this generation of kids in being more “color and religion blind” We are from a small midwest town which is 90+% christian/caucasion. I probably met 30 or so people from my son’s floor between move-in and parent’s weekend. Son’s roommates were a Jewish kid from the east coast and an African American/Philippino from a southern state. One of them is gay. He loved both of them. Two of his best friends on his floor were a girl who is half hawaiian and half japanese and a girl who is half Vietnamese and half German. There was a kid down the hall with a German surname who looks asian and grew up in the middle east. There was a kid across the hall who has a scandinavian surname and looks african/american. There were also an American who grew up in London, a French kid, a fair number of garden variey caucasian and asian kids. A lot of really interesting people. Specifically regarding African/Americans, there was an African/American guy a few doors down the hall who participated in some music fun with my son, and the RA for the floor was African/American plus the kid with the scandinavian surname who I suspect is half African/American but it doesn’t really matter. These kids on this floor got along great and had a great first year as far as I can tell and the facebook photos suggest that they didn’t segregate by ethnicity to any great degree. Some of them just can’t segregate, because they aren’t only one ethnicity. There certainly are times when minority groups choose to self segregate for legitimate reasons and some individuals probably do that a majority of the time. I also am not naive enough to think that there isn’t some racism or prejudice everywhere. The limited view I have into this one small slice of USC was very positive in terms of breadth of diversity and the people who didn’t really place a high degree of importance on their differences. </p>
<p>I probably couldn’t tell who was rich and snobby, but we have a nice middle class lifestyle and all my kids get to learn to be poor when they go to college. My son didn’t have any issues finding good people to hang out with and have fun without spending much money. He probably wouldn’t be drawn to rich snobby kids and probably wouldn’t care what they are doing, so no conflict for him.</p>