What do Ivy League students think of USC?

I graduated from USC in 2004 and enrolled in graduate school at Harvard right afterward. I have also spent over 10 years in the intervening period living up and down the East Coast (Boston, Long Island, NYC, and DC). read more

So I’d say that most Ivy League students likely consider USC to be on par with other top universities like UCLA, Georgetown, Emory, and Carnegie Mellon. At the same time, they probably draw a pretty clear distinction between so-called “Ivy Plus” universities (the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, Caltech, etc.) and other elite universities. read more

I am from a highly competitive Northeast school that sends approximately 30-50 students every year to Ivies or Ivy equivalents (Stanford, MIT, etc). I applied to all 8 Ivies. Got accepted by Dartmouth, transfer option from Cornell, wait listed at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, rejected from Brown, Princeton, and Penn (deferred ED and then rejected from Wharton). read more

All the Ivy matriculants from my daughter's high school the last few years were obvious profiles: Top 10 overall ranking (out of 200), great but not perfect test scores, super involved at school, charismatic, outgoing, and always obsessive readers. read more