I remember being a newly admitted student excited about the incredible chance to learn in a dynamic city like Los Angeles while attending USC. However, while USC brands itself as part of L.A., many students rarely engage with the South Central community that lies right past our campus gates.

USC’s campus can feel like a world of its own, insulated from the surrounding South Central neighborhood. This campus bubble fosters disengagement and makes it easy for students to remain unaware of or uninterested in the local community.

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Students often see South Central through a lens of fear or indifference. Crime and police activity warnings from the Department of Public Safety that alert students about nearby incidents could be a factor in this mindset of assuming we’re in a bad or unsafe area, but these assumptions do not reflect the whole picture.

Students’ negative perceptions of the South Central community lead to a reluctance to engage with the community — students tend to stick to shopping in USC Village instead of supporting local South Central businesses or learning about the neighborhood’s history. Instead, they stick to familiar spaces, reinforcing the idea that South Central is a temporary place for students rather than a home to thousands of families and businesses.

The lack of engagement from students with the area around USC produces elitism. Ignoring the neighborhood means students unintentionally buy into stereotypes and widen the socioeconomic and racial divide between USC and the surrounding area.

South Central is 80% Hispanic and 16% Black, while 21.9% of USC students are white. In addition, the cost of attending USC is $95,225, while median household income in South Central is $56,790, and 45% make under $50k a year. There’s an extremely stark difference in race and economic status that reproduces elitism and systemic racism.

A school that prides itself on being in the heart of L.A. should encourage students to experience it firsthand and use community engagement as an active part of the educational journey.

To bridge this gap, USC should implement a volunteering requirement. By mandating student involvement in the local community, the University can help students foster meaningful connections, empathy and a deeper understanding of the divide between USC and South Central that students perpetuate. Volunteering would simultaneously benefit students and strengthen USC’s ties to the community.

Students could better grasp the local community’s challenges and strengths, whether through tutoring, food distribution or supporting local nonprofits.

Increased volunteering strengthens USC’s relationship with the community. A culture of service could help shift external perceptions of the University for it to seem less like an isolated institution and more like an engaged and supportive neighbor, creating goodwill and long-term, positive change.

USC’s isolation isn’t just about student engagement. The University has also contributed to it. USC has displaced longtime South Central residents by driving up rent prices, and building USC Village replaced an affordable community shopping center with expensive stores that mostly serve students. Local families and businesses are pushed out as the University expands, making the divide even worse. 

The most impactful implementation would be to integrate a volunteering requirement into the General Education Program. Having 21,000 students participating in community service around the neighborhood would drastically increase the University’s positive impact, providing support to local organizations while encouraging a sense of shared investment in the community’s well-being.

This isn’t a novel idea, considering volunteer requirements have already been enacted at other universities. Tulane University requires students to complete at least two major community service-related projects or courses in their local New Orleans community. Each year, the Tulane community logs an average of 550,000 hours of community service in New Orleans. 

USC offers a few community engagement programs and community service classes, but they aren’t well advertised to the majority of students, and participation is voluntary, meaning many students feel no obligation to get involved with them. As a result, community engagement remains limited to a self-selecting group rather than being a shared experience among all students.

The Joint Education Project through the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences has community outreach opportunities in service learning and volunteering. There are also courses that include community service assignments in many disciplines, like “Humans and Their Environment,” which includes the Peace Project, an after-school program for elementary school students in L.A. Unified School District, or multiple writing courses that have volunteer choices like being a writing mentor through 826LA, a nonprofit focused on tutoring and writing for kids in L.A.

The issue isn’t a lack of service opportunities — it’s USC’s lack of emphasis to prioritize and promote them.

USC has the resources to encourage meaningful community engagement, but without a structured requirement, most students miss out on these opportunities. By integrating volunteering into the GE curriculum, USC can ensure that every student experiences L.A. beyond just the boundaries of campus. Ultimately, a culture of service would create a more connected university where students don’t just live and study in L.A., but truly engage with it.