<p>@DavidSonDaughter - Ah, you are right. I should have taken into account the privates that are located in mega states, especially California. Of course I could go into my rant about how California needs to be broken up into three states, but that wouldn’t make you less right. Nice catch.</p>
<p>Still, I suspect that the percentage from their home state will continue to decrease with time, especially in the case of USC, unless other world events cause energy prices, and thus travel costs, to skyrocket. But if things that affect this sort of phenomenon stay relatively stable, I think that USC will continue to draw more interest from students in the eastern 2/3 of the country. I would love to see a state by state breakdown of both their application pool and their acceptance pool. The latter would be especially interesting to see if the students that turned USC down for other schools were disproportionally from outside California and by how much compared to the final class demographics.</p>