USC accepts its highest number of first-gen students

The Class of 2024, USC’s largest incoming class ever, has the highest number of first-generation students in the University’s history, USC News reported Tuesday. 

This year’s incoming class had 3,460 freshmen, with 22.5% of the class comprising first-gen students. This is a 7.5 percentage point increase in first-gen students, up from 15% last year. Dean of Admission Timothy Brunold said that the University has long had an interest in this type of diversification, but that the new USC Affordability Initiative, which guarantees a tuition-free education to students whose families make $80,000 or less a year, may have helped encourage matriculation. 

“I think that affordability initiative really helped us to further illustrate to prospective students and their families that this is something, if admitted, something that could help make USC a much more realistic option for them,” Brunold said. 

As a whole, the Class of 2024 received $400 million in financial aid from University sources, which is a $25 million increase from last year. 

This year’s incoming class was also the first to start USC with access to the First Generation Plus Success Center, which Brunold said was one of the ways the University supports admitted first-gen students. The First Generation Plus Success Center, which President Carol Folt announced this summer, is a resource and support hub that aims to help facilitate the transition of first-gen students to college life. 

“It’s more important than ever that the University continues to support these students, and I’m really pleased with what I’ve seen,” Brunold said. “First-generation students, local students are really being embraced at the University.” 

The University saw a 3 percentage point increase in underrepresented students of color, a group that includes Latinx/Hispanic, African American, Native American/Pacific Islander and students with multiple ethnicities. The Class of 2024 comprises 30% underrepresented students of color, with slight increases in Latinx/Hispanic students and Asian/Asian American students, who are not included in the underrepresented statistic. The number for Black students remained at 6%. 

The USC Leslie and William McMorrow Neighborhood Academic Initiative, a seven-year free college prep program for high school students in South and East L.A., also expanded its efforts, Brunold said. This year’s admissions cycle included the first NAI graduating classes from Lincoln and Wilson high schools, and the Foshay Learning Center continued to be a top local feeder to USC, sending 25 students to the University this year. Brunold said that as the NAI program continues to expand in the area, he expects more local students to attend USC. 

Beyond L.A., students from California continue to be the most represented state in USC’s incoming class, followed by New York, Texas, Illinois and Washington. International students made up 12% of the incoming class, a decrease from past years likely due to the coronavirus pandemic, Brunold said. There was also an increase in California-based students, which Brunold said likely shows many students opted to stay closer to home this admissions cycle.

“But that being said, it is still the case that the majority of our students are coming from outside of the Southern California area,” Brunold said. “So while I do think there was an impact, I don’t think the impact was that great in the overall scheme of things.”

While Brunold did not note significant enrollment differences because of the pandemic, he said that the admissions office increased its acceptance rate for the Class of 2024 because of the uncertainties around enrollment. The first-year admission rate was 16.1%, which is a 4.7 percentage point increase from the 11.4% acceptance rate for the Class of 2023. Before this year, the University’s admission rate decreased every year since 2015. 

“We release admission decisions toward the end of March. That was the same time as we all remember that everything was really grinding to a halt, so there was a lot of uncertainty in higher education,” Brunold said. “We were just happy in the admission office that we didn’t have to disappoint so many students. That being said, a lot of the admission rate has to do with thinking about what’s going on at the time … the admission rate this year was about 16% and that was definitely in response to thinking about the uncertainty.”

Last year, USC accepted 7,558 students, 42% of whom enrolled in Fall 2019, making it one of the highest yield rates in University history. This year, USC had a lower yield rate, with 36% of the 9,618 accepted students enrolling for Fall 2020. Unlike some other universities, students at USC were not allowed to defer enrollment because of the pandemic.

Of those students, 1,447 transfer students enrolled at USC this fall. Forty-one of these students are veterans or reservists and 52% of them previously attended a California community college.

“There’s always been a commitment to transfers at USC, and I don’t really see that changing at any time,” Brunold said. “Not only do we conduct outreach and recruitment for first-year students, but we also treat transfer students again as their own population. They’re not an afterthought at USC.”