I agree with GMTplus7 - I’m a student here on financial aid, and I can’t imagine why if a university doesn’t simply “give” you enough money to attend, they’re “stingy”. I’m not exactly paying $0 to attend, so obviously, I can hope for the university to give me more money like everyone else, but that’s just how it is. Private universities like USC are not-for-profit, but neither do they have an obligation to make finances a complete non-issue for everyone. Public universities are subsidized somewhat by the government, but even they have to charge tuition, and are motivated to accept a disproportionate number of out of state students to lighten the burden. Yet, when they increase tuition by $500 a quarter, everyone jumps up and calls the UCs greedy. So yeah, they froze tuition and now UCLA is operating at a loss of $1 billion a year, according to their 2014 income statement, which they will have to make up for with even larger class sizes, worse facilities in the short term, and eventually higher tuition in the long term anyway to pay back the $7 billion debt they’re loading on.
Universities need revenue streams to continue to operate and pay high salaries for good faculty to do research, and many lecturers to teach smaller classes. If you look at USC’s financial report (and that of comparative private universities) it’s not like they accumulate billions in tuition at the end of the year and stash it all away in the bank. 99% of it goes back into growth and operating expenses, save for a few million in retained earnings.
USC is perceived as “wealthy” in terms of endowment and donations, but the fact of the matter is, no donors contribute money to the school to subsidize tuition. Donations all come with various stipulations on their use - endowing certain departments, creating scholarships, developing buildings… A $10 million donation at most could pay for 50 students to attend for 4 years for free. That’s why that kind of money goes towards merit scholarships, not financial aid.
Schools like Stanford and Harvard are almost 10x wealthier than USC, with way fewer students to have to subsidize - they could allow everyone to attend their school for absolutely free and sustain that for 20-30 years before emptying out the bank, but you don’t see them leading the way in a free tuition campaign (except for Harvard, which just made it free for low income kids to attend… who would have attended for free on financial aid anyway. Nice marketing campaign). That’s just not how things work.
It’s not like USC is the only good school you would have been admitted to. If USC truly stingy with financial aid, then you or any other admittee is likely to go and contribute their talents, achievements, future donations, and yield numbers to that of another university. That’s USC’s loss, so they will do their best to mitigate that. Unfortunately, they can’t make it perfect for everyone. That’s how all private universities operate, and if anything, I found USC’s offer to more generous than packages I received from certain other schools.
Financial aid is an impossible thing to perfect - at what point does a student truly “need” money to attend school? Their parents making 50k? 100k? 500k? What if parents making 50k have built up an enormous college fund for their kid to attend school, while the 500k family is barely keeping up with their mortgage and car payments? What if their parents make millions and won’t assist their child in paying for school? This is why middle class families lose out the most. All of these scenarios are impossible to equalize. Whatever lack of justice you perceive to exist in your situation, unfortunately the university cannot even comprehend that when they’re just given a bunch of income and tax figures to work with