Founded in 1880 by a small group of community leaders, USC is the oldest private research university in California and grew alongside Los Angeles into a powerhouse in film, engineering, and the arts.
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USC is one of the strongest US entrepreneurial universities outside the MIT/Stanford tier, anchored by the Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (founded 1971, the oldest entrepreneurship program in the country) within the Marshall School. Its USC Marshall/Greif Incubator has supported 250+ student/alumni companies that have collectively raised over $300 million, and notable alumni founders include Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Sean Rad (Tinder, launched at USC), Brandon Beck and Marc Merrill (Riot Games), and Chris DeWolfe (MySpace). USC has produced one of the largest cohorts of billionaire alumni of any university worldwide.
USC crossed $1.04 billion in annual research expenditures (FY ending June 30, 2023), making it one of only 13 private universities to exceed $1B, and it ranks fifth nationally / first on the West Coast in computer and information sciences spending ($112M in 2022). Its flagship Information Sciences Institute (ISI) helped design ARPANET and the internet and pulls in over $100M annually, while the Viterbi School of Engineering houses leading AI and engineering labs. USC faculty include Nobel laureates George Olah (Chemistry 1994) and Arieh Warshel (Chemistry 2013), plus Turing Award winner Leonard Adleman (2003, the 'A' in RSA).
USC pairs genuine industry stars with a strong record of getting senior people into actual classrooms. In the School of Cinematic Arts, Oscar-winning director Robert Zemeckis (a 'Widney Professor') personally taught CTAN 599: Motion Capture Performance, and Lucas-endowed chairs Bruce Block (Sergei Eisenstein Chair, Cinematic Design), Mike Fink (George Melies Chair, Visual Effects) and Alex McDowell (William Cameron Menzies Chair, Production Design) teach craft courses. Dornsife's Michael Quick (neuroscientist, former Provost) still teaches Biology 423 'Epilepsy to Ecstasy' each spring, and three Marshall professors made Poets & Quants' 50 Best Undergraduate Professors of 2024.
USC's 'Trojan Family' is one of the largest and most famously loyal alumni networks in the world, with 500,000+ living alumni and regional Trojan Networks from Sao Paulo to London to Taipei. It has produced 15+ billionaires including George Lucas (Lucasfilm) and Marc Benioff (Salesforce), founders of Riot Games (Marc Merrill, Brandon Beck) and MySpace, plus heads of state such as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Prime Minister of Pakistan), Abdurrahim El-Keib (interim PM of Libya) and Ljupco Jordanovski (acting President of Macedonia). The School of Cinematic Arts gives it a uniquely dominant entertainment-industry network (Lucas, Spielberg attended, Shonda Rhimes, John Singleton), alongside Neil Armstrong, architect Frank Gehry, and NASA administrator Charles Bolden.
Because of its Los Angeles location and film/journalism schools, USC has one of the densest pipelines of working luminaries in US higher ed. The John Wells Division of Writing's 'Conversations With...' series brings leading writers, producers and directors for Friday-afternoon Q&As hosted by MFA students, with past guests including Spike Jonze, Sidney Poitier, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer. Annenberg runs the R. Rebecca Donatelli Experts-in-Residence series (launched with Cokie Roberts) and the IDEA Speaker Series (which featured David Simon), while the Greif Center hosts year-round Fireside Chats and a Startup Survival Series with founders. Filmmaker Jon M. Chu gave the 2025 universitywide commencement address.
USC sits at the heart of the Los Angeles tech hub, the third-largest US startup ecosystem (~$155B valued, ~258,000 tech workers, 500+ VC firms), which uniquely concentrates three powerhouse research universities -- USC, UCLA and Caltech -- within roughly an hour of each other. USC feeds this directly through its Lloyd Greif Center for Entrepreneurial Studies (68 entrepreneurship courses, 27 instructors), the Viterbi Startup Garage incubator in Marina del Rey at the center of 'Silicon Beach' (Playa Vista, Santa Monica, Culver City), and the Stevens Center for Innovation. The Greif incubator's graduates have collectively raised over $300 million in funding. It lacks the single-campus density of an MIT/Kendall Square or Stanford/Palo Alto cluster, but the LA tri-university talent pool is a genuine cross-pollination advantage.
USC funds aid generously: it awards roughly $640 million annually in scholarships and grants, with about two-thirds of undergraduates receiving aid. Named merit awards run through the Office of Admission - the full-tuition Trustee Scholarship, half-tuition Presidential Scholarship, and quarter-tuition Deans Scholarship - plus a $20,000/year award for National Merit Finalists. PhD students are funded through the USC Graduate School (2025-26 minimum stipend $41,200; Annenberg doctoral students get $41,715/year for up to five years). One caveat: in 2025 USC cut merit funding for budget reasons, narrowing new awards to one Trustee and three Presidential scholarships to protect the need-based pool.
USC is an expensive US private in one of the country's costliest cities. The official 2025-26 cost of attendance is $99,139, of which tuition alone is $73,260 (up 4.8% year-over-year), plus $1,902 in fees, $12,879 housing and $8,028 food on campus. Off-campus Los Angeles living adds heavy pressure: shared rooms near USC run $600-$900/month and private rooms $900-$1,400/month, with citywide one-bedrooms averaging around $2,300/month. Generous aid (the $80k free-tuition threshold, $640M in grants) cushions lower-income families, but the sticker cost places raw affordability near the bottom of the global scale.
USC's University Park campus offers one of the richest student lives in US higher education: over 1,000 registered student organizations, 38+ fraternity and sorority chapters across five governing councils, and a powerhouse Division I athletics program (the Trojans hold 138 NCAA national championships and produced athletes who have won 160 Olympic gold medals). Wellbeing is well-resourced through Counseling & Mental Health Services, the peer-support 'Trojans Care for Trojans' network, the Kortschak Center for Learning, and five cultural community centers (APASS, CBCSA, LA CASA, LGBTQ+, First Gen Plus). The main drawbacks are the surrounding South Los Angeles neighborhood's safety perception and the very high cost of living in LA, which pressures student budgets.
USC delivers strong work-study outcomes driven by its Career Center (which maintains partnerships with over 5,000 organizations) and the famously deep 'Trojan Network' alumni base. The First Destination Survey shows roughly 66% of Class of 2024 undergraduates employed within six months and about 20% in continuing education, with a median undergraduate starting salary near $70,000 (rising to $85,000-$91,500 for computer science/engineering tracks). Top recruiters include Deloitte, PwC, EY, KPMG, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and JPMorgan Chase, and graduate programs report even stronger figures (USC Marshall MBA average around $144,000). Its Los Angeles location gives students unusually strong access to tech, finance, media and entertainment internships.
| Academic reputation | 61.2 |
| Employer reputation | 69.6 |
| Employment outcomes | 98.0 |
| Overall (QS) | 62.6 |
Ranking data: QS World University Rankings 2026.
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