@blueskies2day It’s not an unappreciative slam, it’s just a statistical fact.
When a school goes from a 75%+ acceptance rate (with low GPAs and SATs) to an 18% acceptance rate (with high SATs and GPAs) in one generation, it’s simply statistically true that most of the people who graduated 25 years ago wouldn’t get in today. They were an academic level of students attending a relatively open enrollment school at the time. And it’s also true that their kids (like most kids) are statistically likely to not have the numbers to get in.
So, not a slam, just a fact (and one, by the way, that applies at varying levels to all top 25 schools).
I agree that many of the people attending today, esp. the 58% on need based financial aid, and the many on academic scholarship who are attending because USC is willing to “buy” their high test scores to boost rankings, are not going to contribute on levels of the past.