<p>USC has also only been a truly good school across the board for the last 10-15 years. The longstanding cliche in California (which I’ve seen to be painfully true) was that if you had brains and no money you went to a UC; if you had brains and money you went to Stanford; if you had money and no brains you went to USC; and if you had no money and no brains you went to a Cal State.</p>
<p>Thankfully USC’s gotten over that hump in the last 10-15 years but it’ll take another generation for that first cohort of alumni to reach a point where they can donate a large amount of money. In the meantime, much of the money that USC has raised in the Sample / Nikias era has come from people with no other affiliation with the university, along with more than a few frustrated donors who otherwise would’ve given to UCLA.</p>
<p>Combine the above with the fact that, as Georgia Girl noted, USC was not founded around a large personal fortune, and it’s impressive that the school has built itself into what it is today, as a lot of that was one continuous crawl upward. Now the school has achieved a critical mass of excellence and the sky is the limit, but even Stanford and Caltech still took several decades to achieve prominence.</p>