At USC, the best advertisement for a club is telling students they can’t get in — the harder a club is to join, the easier it is to assume it’s worth joining.

Let’s be real: If a club makes you write essays, sit through multiple interviews and compete with a huge applicant pool, it starts to feel important before you even know what members get out of it. The process itself creates hype. Suddenly, “hard to get into” starts sounding a lot like “worth getting into” — even though those are two completely different things.

That’s the trap. Selectivity can become a form of marketing when the difficulty of getting into an organization becomes part of what makes it look prestigious. So, the real question is whether that prestige comes from what a club actually delivers or from how difficult it is to access.

That question matters at USC, because club recruitment can look a lot like internship recruiting. Applications can include written responses, interviews and multiple rounds of evaluation, all for the chance to participate in an organization run by other students.

The Daily Trojan reported in 2024 that some Marshall club programs required several essays and multiple rounds of interviews, while students described a “distinct gap” between the number of applicants and students admitted. USC now requires recognized student organizations to maintain open membership, meaning clubs must be open to all eligible students to remain recognized by the University.

However, that hasn’t eliminated selectivity. Some organizations still maintain selective teams, cohorts or programs within their broader membership structure that students have to compete with each other to join. The velvet rope didn’t disappear; in some cases, it just moved further inside.

This isn’t just students falling for the hype. A 2022 analysis featured in the Journal of Retailing, covering 131 studies, found that limited availability can make something seem more desirable, exclusive, popular and valuable.

Basically, when not everyone can have something, our brains start inflating its worth before we’ve even asked if it deserves the buzz. And on a campus where getting into certain clubs can feel like getting into college all over again, that should make us question ourselves: Are we chasing the experience or the flex of being chosen?

When enough students want in, demand starts looking like proof of quality. The club seems prestigious because it’s competitive, then stays competitive because everyone has heard it is prestigious. At that point, prestige feeds into itself.

And that’s where students need to be more skeptical.

Hundreds of applications can tell us that hundreds of people want something, but they can’t tell us whether the people who got in were satisfied. Multiple interview rounds can tell us that an organization is selective, but they can’t tell us whether members receive better mentorship, build stronger skills or leave with better opportunities. We’ve gotten so used to treating competition as a stamp of approval that sometimes, we forget to ask for receipts.

To be fair, some programs genuinely can’t take everyone without watering down the experience: A consulting team with a real client can’t put 200 students on one project, and a mentorship program can’t promise meaningful one-on-one support to an unlimited number of people.

But the issue isn’t that spots are limited; it’s whether the value of the experience actually justifies the scarcity. Selectivity shouldn’t be the only selling point: If students are fighting this hard to get in, there should be something real on the other side of the acceptance email besides bragging rights.

So maybe the real boast isn’t getting into the hardest club — it’s knowing what you’re actually getting out of it. Before spending hours on an application, students should ask themselves one question: Would I still want to be in this club if nobody knew how hard it was to get into?

Prestige is easy to maintain when competition keeps reinforcing it, but actual value is harder to fake: It has to show up in the work members do, the skills they build and the experience they take with them when the semester ends.

USC students are already competing for internships, jobs, grades and opportunities. We don’t need to turn every extracurricular into another elite admissions cycle without asking what we’re actually competing for. Selectivity might make admission desirable, but doesn’t automatically make it worth our time.