@clarinetdad16 - Let me put out a hypothetical scenario since I am going purely numbers without any inside information.
Let us assume that the highest rated students at USC are those that get full tuition scholarships.
If there are 120 such scholarships and 51,000 people applied, it is turning out that only 0.2% of the applicants received them. That is a very high level of exclusivity.
Now they have to distribute the scholarships between the different schools and may be allocate some to each major within the school. Add another layer to this - interest in school and now things get a bit muddled.
One could be in top 200 of the Engineering applicants for example but if Engineering school has only 30 full scholarships to give (I don’t have any clue how many they actually do have), they have to decide which 60 are so (not sure about the number invited to compete) are the most desirable to that school and also make guesses as to who would actually show up if given a full scholarship. Let us say there are 150 of them who applied to computer engineering (CE) and only 50 who applied to other majors in Engineering. Let us say they are distributing the 30 scholarships somewhat equally between the majors or may be proportionally based on how many each department usually has and computer engineering has only 6 available to them (hypothetical number). So out of 150 top applicants in CE 130+ are eliminated from contention right off the bat. However, the 50 top students applying to other majors in Engineering school can probably all be invited to contend for a full scholarship since there are 24 scholarships available to them.
I believe the break down of full scholarships for each school and how each school distributes them within the school in terms of majors will determine how the kids fare. Being top 1% of the nation or top 1% of the school’s applicants still does not get you close to the full scholarship. Where you stack up in the applicants within the school you apply to determines whether you will make that cut.