Daily ip Trojan
Volume LXVIII. No. 13
University of Southern California
Los Angeles, California
Thursday, October 2, 1975
The intellectual?
The powerful?
A football team?
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By Mike Meyer
We are SC! We are SC!
The proclamation bellows forth from the Coliseum each football Saturday.
But what is USC? An intellectual community? Wealth and power? A football team?
To sum it up, USC is prestige. Or so said nearly half of 300 students surveyed at seven Southland colleges, who chose this university as the most prestigious in Southern California.
The random survey, which was conducted by the Daily Trojan, asked each student to list in order the three Southern California colleges or universities he considered to be the most prestigious.
Before shouting huzzah over the results, we should note that the students were not allowed to select their own schools, nor was any balloting done here.
Secondly, a considerable number of those surveyed—at such institutions as UCLA, Caltech, Cal State Long Beach and Whittier College—remarked that the most prestigious does not necessarily mean the best and filled out their ballots accordingly.
The students were not told who was conducting the survey until their ballots were completed and returned.
Perhaps the university’s image is better expressed in the wide range of comments from students at other schools and from members of the surrounding community.
Whether making positive or negative statements, nearly all agreed that this university would be the easiest Southland school to evaluate because of its widespread reputation.
And that reputation may be changing, as people learn that many stereotypes connected with the university are no longer valid, if they ever were.
Bill Kooiman, a junior in business at San Diego State, said, “Most students here seem to think that when you hear USC, you say, ‘Oh, you get a quality education there,’ but I’m not at all convinced of that “You also hear that a person from SC has a better chance of getting a job than a state-university graduate, and it may be true. But I also think that even though they may get the first jobs, the staying power comes from somewhere else.”
Ruth Haalboom, a sophomore in
psychology at the University of Redlands, echoed Kooiman’s evaluation.
“Somehow, it seems like having the SC name on your law degree does carry some weight,” she said.
“I don’t know if it’s justifiable, but it’s recognizable.”
But to most students, getting a degree from this university means something of more immediate concern-shelling out $108 a unit.
Possibly due to the prominence of football or the Row, the university retains its “rich-kid” image.
But more outsiders are discovering that a significant percentage of students here are severely disadvantaged economically. Or, more precisely, many are poor.
Bud Hopps, director of public relations at the California Museum of Science and Industry, graduated from the School of Journalism here in 1952.
Hopps believes the economic crunch has created a more diverse student body.
“From what I’ve reaa, aoout half the students at SC are on scholarship of some sort,” Hopps said, “so now it’s probably a mixture of the old WASP-elitist crowd that I remember as a student, plus the poor boys, who used to have to take the streetcar to school and were the social outcasts.”
But for many others, the university retains its image as a rich kid’s school.
“It’s for people who have a lot of money and who go there so they can become richer when they come out,” said Mark Brown, a student at Humboldt State University.
Dave Hardin, a Cal State Fullerton graduate, applied to USC’s School of Pharmacy three years in a row and was rejected each time.
“I don’t have any prejudice against the university,” Hardin said. “I’ve reconciled myself to the fact that I don’t have what it takes to get in—a rich uncle.”
For some of Haalboom’s classmates at Redlands there was a certain amount of disdain for this university, not because of money, but because they believed the school was big and impersonal.
They also felt that students were more interested in social activities than academics.
But once the Redlands students were into graduate work, Haalboom said, they would be more likely to switch to a school like this one
“I’ve always thought that SC has had fairly high academic standards and I hadn’t thought of it as a social school until I started talking with a lot of people,” Haalboom said.
“If the circumstances were such, I would certainly consider going there.
“And besides, they have a good football team.”
Another student, a junior premed at Cal State Long Beach who attended USC for five semesters, said the basic
difference between the two schools is that competition, especially in health sciences, is much greater here.
He did not think students receive as much personal attention at this university since some classes have 200 or 300 people enrolled.
“They probably make the classes a little harder at USC, just as a weeding-out process,” the student said. “But still, even though it’s a little harder, when you come out of class you know the material.
“The quality of education is much better at Sf ”
For Mark Brown of Humboldt State, the quality education here is limited to the School of Business and the School of Medicine.
“And even those two just teach the students to be probusiness people,” Brown said. “I really think they fail in their academics.”
Brown also disliked the neighborhood:
“One weekend we went walking by
SC.
“There was this bicycle chained to a light post, and all that was left was the frame—the seat, wheels, handlebars and everything else was gone.
“Obviously, I don’t care for the place at all,” Brown said
Dave Goble, a political science major at Cal State Fullerton, said the neighborhood and high crime rate would not have been sufficient to deter him from attending this university, if only the money were available.
“Political science is a big field there and they’ve got some good instructors,” Goble said. “I checked it out, looked through catalogues, hoping I could make it somehow, but it’s just too expensive for me.”
(continued on page 10)
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