<p>Thanks for the supportive posts. Like most parents, I want my kids to have a positive experience in college and am disappointed when one doesn’t. As fate would have it he just told me that this year he finally has one class that he really loves. (and no I didn’t mention my post). It was a long time coming, but as you might expect, it’s great to hear.</p>
<p>Transfer vs freshman
for USC(2007): 1114/2963 = 37.60%
for UCLA(2007): 3286/4712 = 69.74%
for UCB(2007): 2036/4204 = 48.43%</p>
<p>You think those colleges aren’t competitive? I do think you have a point, but there’s no reason to degrade USC, all colleges accept spring admits.</p>
<p>^Sorry I posted those stats based on their Common Data Set. I did not degrade USC. I just wanted to show that USC/UCLA/UCB/Cornell accept a lot of transfers and among them USC is the least among the California schools. As far as rankings they are all in the same ballpark, all Tier 1, in the top 30 colleges out of 3000-4000.</p>
<p>leonine - I reread my earlier post and realized how rude it was. I misinterpreted your post, so I’d like to apologize for my rashness (I’ve requested to have my post deleted).</p>
<p>I looked up the degree in English, and it only requires 10 classes. Your son could have easily fit in a minor or even another major that interests and intellectually challenges him (philosophy? political science?). There’s also an honors program in English, but it’s probably too late since your son is a senior. Anyway, I’m sorry USC didn’t live up to your son’s expectations. For now, it’s living up to mine.</p>
<p>Leonine, I share the concern that some others have expressed that students considering USC will generalize from your post. I’m not questioning your son’s perception of his experience at USC, and I think it’s really unfortunate. But I also wanted to provide a link to the English Dept. so that interested prospective students and parents can assess the richness vs. paucity of the offerings themselves, and can also see the various lectures and discussions that go on throughout the week. It can be found here: </p>
<p>[USC</a> College Department of English](<a href=“http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/engl/home/index.shtml]USC”>http://www.usc.edu/schools/college/engl/home/index.shtml)</p>
<p>I was noticing that Aimee Bender and T. Coraghessan Boyle, writers whose work I find extremely interesting, are both on the English faculty. Do undergrads have access to them?</p>
<p>According to the schedule of classes on the department website, Bender teaches a fiction class. I’m not sure if Boyle teaches, but I know he did an event for Visions and Voices regarding his writing.</p>
<p>TC Boyle is supposed to be teaching Creative Writing. He is teaching
ENGL 697: Graduate Fiction Writing Workshop (4 units, max 12)</p>
<p>From what I’ve been told TC Boyle does teach sometimes. I consider him to be an amazing writer but not sure how well liked he is as a teacher. Bender is supposed to be great as are Wiggins and Everett. </p>
<p>RE course selection limitations I don’t want to raise any more hackles. The best thing is look for yourself and decide.</p>
<p>“on the whole have been much better than the GEs he had to take”
As a USC parent of a very bright student[ Trustee Scholar] I have to agree with leonine on this point. I mean please- the Diversity requirement can be met by watching movies with with 100 other students once a week? What a joke. On the other hand, students who ARE able to take TO classes and Honors science classes have the benefit of working with the top profs at USC in stimulating classes that are Hard. But these are offered or available to only a limited # of students. I think that USC needs to seriously up the quality of all of it’s "core "classes, if it seriously wants to ever be considered “the Stanford of SCal”, which is a goal.</p>
<p>USC is adding more professors to the College of Arts and Sciences. Some of these professors came from pretiguous universities.
[USC</a> College : News : 2008 : September : New Faculty](<a href=“http://college.usc.edu/news/2008/09/faculty.html]USC”>http://college.usc.edu/news/2008/09/faculty.html)</p>
<p>Starting 2007, there are initiatives to improve the College for the GE requirements.
[USC</a> College : News : September 2007 : New College Initiatives](<a href=“http://college.usc.edu/news/september_2007/initiatives.html]USC”>http://college.usc.edu/news/september_2007/initiatives.html)</p>
<p>USC College Welcomes New Trojans
Dont limit yourself by preconceived notions of whats practical, Dean Howard Gillman advises newcomers.
[USC</a> College : News : 2008 : August : Welcome Day Picnic](<a href=“http://college.usc.edu/news/2008/08/welcome.html]USC”>http://college.usc.edu/news/2008/08/welcome.html)</p>
<p>Yes, USC is fast becoming known in the academic world by it’s new nick-name- " University of Stolen Colleagues" but it needs to do a lot more than offer $1000 research stipends to attract the highly academic undergraduate students it is trying to reel in. Just my 2 cents of course.</p>
<p>Stanford was party school in the 60’s, this article was written in 1993.
[Thoughts</a> on undergraduate education](<a href=“http://www.usc.edu/academe/acsen/documents/whitepapers/wp93_davison.htm]Thoughts”>http://www.usc.edu/academe/acsen/documents/whitepapers/wp93_davison.htm)</p>
<p>I hope with this paper to generate some frank, collegial discussion about the quality of undergraduate education here at USC. One of the valued features of an academic setting is the context it provides for an open exchange of views, even when, or especially when, such exchanges involve challenging cherished assumptions and beliefs.</p>
<p>Educating the whole student</p>
<p>In my view, there is a need better to coordinate instructional efforts with other areas of student life. It is debatable whether efforts to enhance tile intellectual life of undergraduates are well integrated with activities in non-classroom domains. Does USC have as a goal the education of the whole student?</p>
<p>I commend to you the report of the Senate Cornmission on Campus Cultural Life chaired by Selma Holo, as published in the first issue of New Senate, the newsletter of the Academic Senate (May,1993). Beyond that report, I suggest to you that the student culture is not adequately considered when faculty and academic administrators’ work to improve undergraduate education. Allow me a personal anecdote, one that seems appropriate, given the occasional comparisons that have been made over the years between USC and Stanford . **When I was a graduate student at Stanford in the early 1960’s, the undergraduate program had only recently begun to achieve distinction. **Earlier seemingly defensive descriptions of Stanford as the “Harvard of the west” were just beginning to sound unnecessary as comprehensive efforts to transform the undergraduate enterprise from its party school image were bearing fruit. By the 1980’s, Stanford undergraduate education was being widely recognized for the first time as among the very best in the country, on a par with the Ivy League and other high-prestige institutions like MIT, the University of Chicago, and several excellent small liberal arts colleges like Swarthmore and Wellesley.</p>
<p>How did the undergraduate enterprise at Stanford move from one that few took seriously to among the best places for young people to obtain bachelor’s degrees, and how was this accomplished in a relatively short time, perhaps two decades?</p>
<p>Let me propose for discussion that is relevant to USC that this could not have happened without attention to the whole student experience and to a willingness to alter some frivolous traditions in favor of a sustained effort to upgrade the intellectual quality of the undergraduate experience. To me there was some meaning in the puckish inscription on a t-shirt that I purchased during a visit to Stanford about 15 years ago, when Stanford was well established as second to none for undergraduate education: “Harvard — Stanford of the east.”</p>
<p>To my mind there is no more compelling a question we have to pose to ourselves as a university than what kind of undergraduate program we wish to have at USC. As faculty and as administrators we have wrestled with this question for years, and certainly President Zurnberge’s Commission on Undergraduate Education, headed by Larry Singer, provided many creative and useful ideas, many of which were implemented by Jerry Segal. But until and unless there is closer coordination of the academic effort with student life more generally can we expect truly meaningful change from the “University of Spoiled Children” image we suffer from, especially right here in Los Angeles?</p>
<p>Academic standards and budgeting</p>
<p>An unfortunate intersection of budgetary considerations and academic standards is to be found in the demands faculty place on students. When courses are advertised and students hustled to enroll so as to build up credit hours to enhance one’s revenue center budget, are there not (subtle) pressures to retain those students in those courses? Are not even departmental budgets driven to some degree by enrollment trends over the years? I am rather certain that the answer to these bothersome questions is yes, whether we like to admit it to ourselves or not. To be sure, faculty have high standards -we come from a subculture that places academic integrity at the top of our values hierarchy. But the pressures are there, and when semesterly credit hours are compared across departments, as they are in LAS, and, I have to assume, in other revenue centers as well, is it not possible that the desire to generate resources creates pressure to ease up on course demands and grading?</p>
<p>Furthermore, might not our system of course evaluations and its role in annual merit ratings and promotional considerations also vitiate faculty efforts to teach appropriately rigorous courses?</p>
<p>During my stint on the University Budget Advisory Committee a number of years ago, data were presented showing that USC undergraduate grades were typically “'adjusted” by some graduate professional schools to correct for our easier grading. Mind you, this controls for the pandemic grade inflation that even the Harvards now talk openly about. So it is not attributable to that post-60’s phenomenon. When was the last time USC had a close look at this?</p>
<p>What to do?</p>
<p>In addition to recent efforts, I would reiterate a proposal I have made from time to time over the years, and that is reflected in the document from the Senate Commission on the Future of the university that Bill Spitzer chaired last year: set as a goal making the Thematic Option Program the norm rather than the exception. What would this mean?</p>
<p>Lots of things. Philosophically, and most fundamentally, it would mean that faculty would take all students seriously as developing intellectuals, and this perception and expectation would be communicated to all students and would, over time, become as much the norm among undergraduates as denigration of intellectual pursuits is for many students today (along with weekend partying that begins on Thursday afternoons). I would respectfully suggest that most undergraduates are not taken seriously by the faculty or by the students themselves. Next, it would mean things like eliminating multiple choice exams in as many courses as possible, one hopes all courses eventually, with a commensurate increase of focus on writing and critical analysis. Reductions in TA support and increases in class size will of course make this difficult, but I would suggest that faculty expectations of their students and of themselves could benefit from some adjustment It seems to me that even in the more technical courses, so-called “objective” evaluation of students is less appropriate than the productive methods of evaluation. After an, when one asks one’s class to discuss an issue, one doesn’t generally end the question or invitation with a range of choices that the respondent is to check. If One teaches to a multiple-guess test, one is not usually doing college-level teaching. And if one teaches well, then such a test will be a mismatch with the nature of the course learning and will therefore be less than fair to the student and detrimental to the learning process. </p>
<p>There have been efforts in recent years consistent with what I’ve said. Certainly the residential college1 system as an idea is a good one, and represents a welcome effort to embed students’ intellectual development in a social and living environment that can support rather than impair efforts made in the classroom. But this system has a long way to go at USC. I had occasion in spring semester of 1988 to live at the Embassy downtown. Allowing for shakedown problems, the Embassy fell rather short of being a true residential college. For one thing, its location away from campus was undesirable, in my opinion. And there was little that approximated an intellectual living environment there. Has Embassy improved significantly as an undergraduate residential college? (Embassy does seem to have developed into an interesting graduate residence, but that is a separate issue.)</p>
<p>Continuing efforts to establish well-conceived under graduate residential colleges, like the new college under the leadership of Professors Toumin and Gustafson, are welcome. They are certainly a necessary element in upgrading the nature of the undergraduate experience, in close conjunction with what I hope will be a TO-ing of the curriculum.</p>
<p>By the way, improving the academic quality of the undergraduate program would have very positive financial implications as well. Over time, we would attract better applicants in larger numbers than we do today. We would also stand a better chance of retaining them, a consequence that would enable us to rely less on transfer students to meet our enrollment targets and would in general create more stability in enrollments. (I am not arguing against transfers per see, but our heavy reliance on them to generate tuition revenues is a mixed blessing). Finally, as I learned some years ago from John Curry on the Budget Committee, the bond ratings of universities have a great deal to do with perceived quality of the undergraduate program.</p>
<p>On changing the undergraduate culture</p>
<p>My final observation is in the form of a question, one that poses a tremendous, challenge to educators and to social scientists in particular: Do we want to change the USC undergraduate culture? We have some unplanned experience with cultural changes in our country. For example, the melting pot metaphor that I suspect all of us grew up with has, it seems, been replaced by a mixed salad metaphor as a way to talk about the blending of different cultures in the United States. Well, what is the student culture at USC, do we want to change it, and, if so, how? To disclaim interest or responsibility is not necessarily tantamount to showing respect for whatever the culture is, rather it is to sanction positively the outcome of decades of complex historical forces that have produced the USC we work in today.</p>
<p>Our external reputation is not terribly good - just read the college guides, which I’ve been tracking almost since I came to USC 14 years ago. Whether we like it or not, these sources are heavily relied upon by parents and high school counselors. While our academic program is presented somewhat more favorably in 1993 than in 1979, we are still not taken seriously as an undergraduate institution in many parts of the country. This is in sharp contrast to our reputation in faculty and graduate research, which is the reason we have been able to attract and even to retain a high-quality faculty and many top-flight graduate students.</p>
<p>I wonder how many faculty regard their undergraduate teaching as a significant positive part of their professional activities at USC. I would propose that USC set as a goal - a far-off but reachable goal - to make our undergraduate enterprise as solid and legitimate as our graduate programs and faculty efforts. This cannot be done in a brief time span - for one thing, given our inadequate endowment, we simply cannot afford to raise our admissions standards overnight and thereby reduce the size of the entering class. But I doubt that anything like this will ever happen if the goal is not clearly set and steadfastly adhered to over a number of years within the context of a closely integrated academic-budgetary plan.</p>
<p>Closing comment</p>
<p>Over the past decade, I have told many parents and secondary school officials that a good student can enjoy a first-rate undergraduate education at USC, second to none, but not as readily a high-quality undergraduate experience (the latter part of my communication has typically been anticipated by the listener).</p>
<p>Talking as I do primarily to Thematic option undergraduates and others like them, I am reminded time and again of the struggle that these young people often have to engage in to nurture their intellectual development while at USC. Most of a student’s time is spent in the company of peers, not in the company of faculty or staff. The larger social context of our narrowly defined educational efforts exerts a major - and often negative influence on the quality of what USC can offer.</p>
<p>Unless we make a concerted and sustained effort to alter the atmosphere that characterizes much student life on campus, I cannot see how our strictly academic efforts can succeed.</p>
<p>Interesting article and certainly since it was written USC has taken big steps toward improving its academic reputation. I have no doubt that for the student who seeks it out, you can get a fabulous education here. On the flip side if you check out the science of human performance thread here, that’s also pretty typical – i.e. kids looking for the easiest way to get through a seemingly pointless GE. I suppose this is typical of a lot of schools and not the end of the world. But I think USC could take a look at their GEs and improve them. Afterall why take a required course if it doesn’t turn out to be a valuable learning experience. That said I think USC is a great school for creative kids, its film school is very respected and I’ve heard its science programs are rigorous and in business its an amazing place to make connections - no doubt about that. My son has met a lot of fascinating, sucessful and ‘connected’ kids there. But that’s all the more reason for them to make the GE experience something that expands the educational experience and not just something to get through with the least effort possible. And this is not to say all GEs are bad. I’m sure there are many good ones, and at least from son’s experience sometimes they are not the ones that every one says are the easiest.</p>
<p>Thematic Option type of learning experience is great for those students who enjoy reading 20 books on the professor’s reading list and enjoys writing multiple papers per week. Some students love the intensity of stacks of intellectual reading, analysis, reasoning and writing. And there are others who thrive on group projects, artistic and musical expression, scientific research, etc. USC has a lot available for different kinds of kids who like to learn about their interests. For some it is writing intensive, and for others knowledge is expressed in other ways. For example, if a student is more of a math-science type who does not enjoy writing, why should s/he be required to take intensive writing courses if humanities is not their interest? I really don’t have a problem with a student seeking easy required classes in classes which are required but not interested in (i.e. not their major or minor areas of study).</p>
<p>My complaint about the GE requirements is of a different lot. Even if you enter USC with the maximum 32 credits from AP classes/tests, you almost have to be at USC for 5 years to do all of the GE requirements, major and minor requirements, foreign language requirements, have time for study abroad and hope to do research and/or an internship. There are so many classes my son wants to take.</p>
<p>Lenonine said: On the flip side if you check out the science of human performance thread here, that’s also pretty typical – i.e. kids looking for the easiest way to get through a seemingly pointless GE.</p>
<p>I also was utterly disgusted by that thread. I wanted to ask why anyone would bother to take the class; it sounds like the kinds of classes I recall from college: created so that the truly remedial student could stay afloat, in order to serve other institutional needs. </p>
<p>As an academic, I cringe every time I see a student on these boards asking for advice about an easy class to enroll in. To paraphrase someone famous, the poor[ly motivated] shall always be with us, but do they have to be so overt about it?</p>
<p>To FauxNom: Some kids have very intensive academic programs (pre-med, etc.) and want to take an “easy” class now and then to keep up their GPA. These kids are under a lot of pressure to get into professional schools and/or keep up scholarships. I don’t have a problem with kids looking for an occasional “easy” class as long as the bulk of the program is academically strong and challenging.</p>
<p>[Southern</a> California to Expand its Collegiate System](<a href=“http://collegiateway.org/news/2006-usc-residential-college-system]Southern”>Southern California to Expand its Collegiate System)</p>
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<p>how are the last few posts related to what collegesc said…</p>
<p>Thank you for this interesting article. I am concerned what happens after freshman year with housing. My son is very happy with on campus housing.
How good is housing after freshman year? What are your chances of on campus housing your sophomore year?</p>