Balanced emphasis would be beneficial
On Dec. 5, 2009, we lost our final football game of the season to the University of Arizona.
On the same day, seven brave Trojans skipped the game to compete in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition — an excruciatingly difficult, six-hour, 12-question, national mathematics competition. As a past participant, I can attest to the immense difficulty of this monster test.
The maximum score on the test is 120. The 2009 median score was 2.
In the past 10 years, the highest number of students USC has entered is seven. Each university has a representative team of three — the Trojan contingency scored 52 team points, placing 84th out of 545 universities. Not only did the team arguably face a harder opponent than the football team that day, it also scored more than double the points.
USC is ranked No. 26 according to the most recent U.S. News & World Report, but its professional schools are ranked even higher — the Viterbi School of Engineering is tied for seventh and the Marshall School of Business is tied for 10th.
U.S. News & World ranked the top-five universities overall: No. 1 Harvard, No. 1 Princeton, No. 3 Yale, No. 4 CalTech, No. 4 MIT, No. 4 Stanford.
The top-five finishers in the Putnam exam? MIT, Harvard, CalTech, Stanford and Princeton. The list of top-five Putnam schools going back to early 1990s consist of universities ranked higher than USC.
If USC wants to move into the next echelon of world-class education and ranking, I suggest the university dedicate the same type of resources to traditional academia it has been devoting to the professional schools.
The university’s academic standing improved because of our administration’s dedication to creating elite professional schools. While our professional schools deserve the highest praise, those universities that are most dedicated to the traditional academic pursuit of knowledge and truth consistently rank the highest.
Betsy Avila | Daily Trojan
According to the fountain plaque on the north entrance to Trousdale Parkway, USC was founded as, “an institution of higher learning dedicated to the search and dissemination of truth.” Many plaques around campus proclaim that, “you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.”
USC once required all students to take courses in logic. Professional schools, much like vocational schools, do not teach how to learn, but rather teach what a student needs to know for a career. These schools apply knowledge and seek applications of knowledge, but fail to pursue knowledge for the traditional arts and sciences.
Currently, the university requires all undergraduates to take six classes across various fields in the arts and sciences as a part of the General Education program. However, the student attitudes regarding the program seem to think of such courses as an afterthought — we only take these classes because they’re a requirement to graduate.
But if the arts and sciences were promoted as heavily as some of the professional programs on campus, it’s likely that such attitudes would change.
The justification for improving the professional schools with little focus on arts and sciences was that those schools had the highest returns of donations from alumni. Although this is true, C. L. Max Nikias, our next president, has the opportunity to increase our academic ranking even further by focusing on the arts and sciences, though doing so might prove difficult because USC has become so professionally oriented.
Our university culture tells us that studying in the College of Letters, Arts & Sciences does not result in a job. We think that English majors will never make money.
The university’s biggest donors might be graduates of professional schools, but improving the arts and sciences to a degree rivaling Princeton and Harvard, however, would result in unapplied “knowledge” majors obtaining jobs previously reserved only for professional major students. In turn, these graduates would be in a position to increase their donations to USC.
In this scenario, USC would rise in the ranks and truly achieve its goal: become the Ivy standard of the West beyond Stanford.
The pursuit of knowledge and truth is a cornerstone in life. Without it, we could very easily live a dull and boring life. In this pursuit, we find ourselves.
The pursuit of knowledge is why people vehemently fight to maintain a liberal arts program and general education at USC. The pursuit of truth shapes us and transforms us to overcome the problems of the world.
USC seeks to be an elite university. With this goal, it must re-establish the pursuit of knowledge and truth among the student body, and it must invest in the arts and sciences so that this knowledge enables professional application.
Nikias would be wise to seek this restoration with the re-establishment of our founding dedication as our fountain and plaques remind us.
Jensen Carlsen is a senior majoring in economics and mathematics. His column “The Bridge” runs Wednesdays.
Erudite, we were seen as a “party school” in the nineties but only a “party school” AMONG the nation’s top universities. In other words, we partied a little harder than Stanford, but compared to 90% of the nation’s universities we were still considered a high-falutin’ nerd school. When Sample tried to curb things like hazing in the 1990s, many of us (I was an undergrad then) thought he would sacrifice our athletic and alumni traditions to turn us into something like Stanford. We were wrong. A decade later, our academics were far higher than before AND our football team was doing far better than in the 1990s. Sample’s efforts proved that academics and athletics are not mutually exclusive. The cohesion of our alumni network, and their enthusiasm for giving back to the school, results from USC’s excellence all around.
BTW, I don’t think you know what “commuter school” means. It means a school that most people commute to, usually because a majority of the student body is from the local area. USC is not a commuter school, because many of our students are from far away places. UCLA is closer to that category. The Cal State schools are better examples.
“We are already leagues ahead of UCLA.”
Interesting, because the data you posted seems to indicate that we are only marginally ahead of them in a limited number of rankings.
We are already leagues ahead of UCLA.
“In the top ten fundraising institutions for 2009, USC placed 7th. This was ahead of Yale, Duke, UCLA, MIT and Univ. of Chicago. USC raised $368 plus million. [UCLA placed 9th.]
The last report I read USC was fifth in the nation in National Merit Scholars. [Data on UCLA was not found.]
Princeton Review ranked [UCLA and] USC 98 in selectivity.
The following are some comparisons of USC and UCLA from US News. This data is from the enrolled 2008-2009 class as there was complete data available.
Endowment as of ’09
UCLA $894,909,000
USC $2,671,426,000
UCLA Admit Rate for the 2008-2009 enrolled class 22.8
USC Admit Rate for the 2008-2009 enrolled class 21.9
ACT composite for enrolled freshmen (USC and UCLA use the exact same system for the ACT)
UCLA 25-31
USC 28-33
Size of freshmen class
UCLA 4735
USC 2766
Faculty Student Ratio
UCLA 1:16
USC 1:9
Faculty Resources Rank (2007 data)
UCLA 42nd
USC 25th
Geographic Representation
UCLA from CA 94%
USC from CA 55%
Giving Contributions to University Ranking
UCLA 109th
USC 8th”
US News Rank and Score
UCLA #24 Score of 73
USC #26 Score of 72
CollegeProwler.com Grades for Academics
UCLA B+
USC A-
Princeton Review Score for Academics
UCLA 80
USC 87
Jensen,
I agree with everything you wrote. As Trojans, let’s not repudiate the fact that USC was once a “party school” with lackluster academics that only immersed itself in football. Oh, you young Trojans don’t know huh? Well, to make the long story short, USC in the early 90’s and prior was an academically inferior school to many. While we jeered at UCLA for losing against us in football, they jeered back even harder at us for us offering lenient admissions and overpriced, private-school tuition. Do you know the implications to what a “commuter school” is? Well, USC used to be one. A “commuter school” isn’t academically challenging because students can commute back and forth to and from home to school because the academics do not take a significant toll on their time; in other words, the academics are easy. I don’t know what the hell presidents and administrators prior to Sample were thinking in letting this school demonstrate complacency in academics while being hellbent on beating everyone at football???
Currently, my cousin who’s a senior in high school holds to the notion that USC is an academically lenient school. She attends an academically competive high school not far away, Peninsula High in Palos Verdes. I don’t believe she is near the top of her senior class, but she thinks that USC is a cakewalk to get accepted to, that’s why she didn’t even bother applying to UCLA nor Cal Berkeley…because their academics are much more difficult and that USC is the “easy alternative.” My cousin is bright, but she’s no valedictorian nor “perfect SAT score” girl. But…USC needs to take concrete steps to extirpate these notions of academic inferiority/leniencey. And I understand the bad economy will significantly decrease the number of applicaitons submitted thereby affecting admission rates.
First things first, let’s not worry about trying to be the “next West Coast Ivy” a la Stanford, or even try to be on par with the Ivies. Let’s be on par with that other school across town that is dubbed the “public Ivy” with its many notable researchers and Nobel Laureates–UCLA. They still trump us in academic prestige, and if you don’t think so then look at those college rankings again.
President Sample did an excellent job, and let’s hope Nikias can do better.