University of Southern California: Inside the Numbers

For the class that entered in Fall 2024, USC did something it had never done before: it opened an early action round. Applications were due November 1, decisions went out January 19, and nothing about the plan was binding. The change looks modest next to the binding early decision programs that dominate selective private admissions, and USC still declines to offer one. But it was the first structural change to the university’s application calendar in years, and it arrived in the middle of a five-year stretch in which almost everything else about USC admissions held unusually steady.

The Common Data Set records a second choice that is rarer still. In every one of the last five filings, USC answered no to the question of whether it maintains a waiting list. Among universities admitting close to one applicant in ten, that is close to unique. There is no early decision to lock in yield, there was no early round at all until recently, and there is no waitlist to absorb a miss. USC builds its class in a single regular round, notifies by April 1, and lives with the result.

This report covers five entering classes, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025, drawn from USC’s Common Data Set filings. It walks through an admit rate that fell and then reversed, the residency picture in the one year USC published it, the testing policy and the gap between what the university says it values and what most applicants submit, the demographic record across the 2023 Supreme Court decision, the degree mix at a university built around professional schools, and an aid commitment that has grown faster than almost anything else in the file. It closes with what the record suggests for applicants.

Application volume and selectivity

Applications rose 18 percent across the window, from 71,031 to 83,488. The admit rate fell for three years, bottomed at 9.8 percent for Fall 2024, and then moved back up to 11.2 percent as USC expanded both its offers and its entering class.

Source: University of Southern California Common Data Sets, Section C1, Fall 2021 through Fall 2025. The 2023-24 filing reports applicant and admit counts by men and women only; enrolled totals for that year are 3,588 on the same basis and 3,633 in the Section B2 cohort.

Applications and overall admit rate, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section C1.

The reversal in the final year is the movement worth understanding. USC made 1,295 more offers for Fall 2025 than for Fall 2024, a 16 percent increase, and enrolled 270 more students. Yield fell from 43.3 to 40.2 percent, which is what happens when an admissions office extends its reach further down a pool. A university without a waiting list has only one lever when it wants a larger class, and that is to admit more students in the regular round and accept a softer conversion rate.

Offers of admission and yield, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section C1.

Yield in the low 40s is respectable rather than commanding. It sits well below the figures at universities with binding early plans and reflects USC’s position in a crowded field of applications that also go to the University of California campuses, to private universities on both coasts, and increasingly abroad.

Who USC admits, by residency

USC published a residency breakdown in only one of these five filings, for Fall 2025, and the pattern in that single year runs against intuition.

Source: USC Common Data Set 2025-2026, Section C1 residency detail.

Admit rate and yield by residency, Fall 2025. Source: USC Common Data Set, Section C1.

International applicants were admitted at the highest rate of the three groups and domestic out-of-state applicants at the lowest. That ordering makes sense once yield enters the picture: Californians convert at 46 percent, well above the other two groups, so a California offer is worth more per letter. The enrolled class runs about 45 percent Californian, 32 percent from other states, and 23 percent international, one of the largest international shares at any American private research university. Because this is a single year of data rather than a trend, it should be read as a snapshot rather than a policy.

What the file rewards

Section C7 has been consistent about the academic core. Rigor of the secondary school record, academic grade point average, the application essay, and recommendations have been rated very important in every readable year. Extracurricular activities, talent, and character have been important. First-generation status, alumni relation, volunteer work, and work experience are considered. Interviews, geographic residence, state residency, religious affiliation, and level of applicant’s interest are not considered, which means campus visits and email contact do not move a decision.

Two entries moved during the window. Class rank slid from considered to not considered, a reasonable response to the shrinking share of high schools that report it; only about 30 percent of USC’s enrolled students submit a rank at all. And the row for racial and ethnic status, which USC rated as considered in its 2021-22, 2022-23, and 2023-24 filings, disappeared from the form entirely in 2024-25, following the Supreme Court’s June 2023 decision.

Testing: optional on paper, weighted in practice

USC has been test-optional throughout this period, and the CDS is unusually candid about what that means. The university reports that it uses scores, that scores are not required but are considered if submitted, and, in most years including the most recent readable one, that standardized test scores are a very important factor. Fewer than half of enrolled students submit any score.

Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section C9. The 2024-25 filing left the SAT composite row blank while reporting section scores; some students submit both tests, so the two submission rates sum above the share submitting any score.

Share of enrolled first-years submitting SAT and ACT scores, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section C9.

Two patterns matter here. The submitted SAT range climbed about 40 points at the 25th percentile across the window, from 1430 to 1470, and 94.5 percent of the most recent submitters scored 1400 or above. Meanwhile ACT submission fell by more than a third, from 19 percent to 12 percent, continuing a national drift toward the SAT. For an applicant, the combination of an optional policy and a very important rating is a clear instruction: submit when the score sits inside or above the reported band, and do not when it does not. The transcript carries the rest, and it is a demanding one, with 28 percent of enrolled students reporting a 4.0 and an average high school grade point average of 3.85.

Who enrolls

USC’s entering class has no majority group, and the composition shifted meaningfully across the five years.

Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section B2, first-time first-year cohort. Under federal reporting guidelines, Hispanic, multiracial, and international students are counted separately rather than within a single race.

First-year class composition, Fall 2021 to Fall 2025. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section B2.

The Black share of the entering class declined in four of the five years, from 8.9 percent to 5.7 percent, with the largest single drop coming in Fall 2024, the first class admitted after the Supreme Court ruling. The international share rose from 12.8 to 20.4 percent over the same period, the largest movement in the table. One line demands caution before any of this is read too confidently: students whose race or ethnicity was not reported jumped to 13.8 percent in Fall 2024 before falling back to 3.7 percent, which means the Fall 2024 column understates several categories and that year-over-year comparisons through that point are unreliable. The direction of the Black and international trends holds across the endpoints regardless.

Where the competition lives

USC is a collection of professional schools wrapped around a college of letters, arts and sciences, and the degree mix shows it. Business alone accounts for more than one degree in five.

Share of bachelor’s degrees by field, 2024-25. Source: USC Common Data Set, Section J.

Business and marketing at 20.8 percent is the largest single share in this series of reports, and it reflects the Marshall School’s scale. Social sciences follow at 11.4 percent. Then comes the field that makes USC unusual: visual and performing arts at 10.7 percent, roughly one degree in nine, carrying the School of Cinematic Arts along with Thornton music, Roski art, and Kaufman dance. Communication and journalism, anchored by Annenberg, accounts for 8.0 percent, computer science 7.9 percent, and Viterbi engineering 7.5 percent.

The practical consequence is that USC admits into named schools with their own review standards, and several of them add requirements beyond the common application. Cinematic Arts, Thornton, Roski, Kaufman, and the Iovine and Young Academy all involve portfolios, auditions, or supplemental creative work, which means the effective deadline for those applicants runs earlier and the effective bar is set by a faculty review rather than by the general admissions rate. Marshall and Viterbi draw enormous volume. A student applying to one of the arts conservatories and a student applying to letters and sciences are running different processes inside the same university, and the published 11 percent describes neither of them well.

Cost, and an aid promise that has outrun it

USC is expensive, and the aid commitment underneath the price has grown quickly. The university reports meeting essentially all demonstrated need, at 99 to 101 percent in every year of this window, and since 2020 it has guaranteed tuition-free attendance for students from families earning $80,000 or less, with home equity excluded from the need calculation.

Average need-based aid package and average need-based grant for first-year students. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Section H2.

The average need-based aid package for first-year students climbed from $58,131 to $90,648 across the five filings, and the average need-based grant from $45,003 to $56,128. In the most recent year, 1,368 of the 1,501 first-year students with demonstrated need had that need met in full. About a third of graduating students borrow, at an average near $26,800.

The published price deserves a caveat. USC has reported the same tuition figure of $66,640 in its last three filings, covering three different academic years, so Section G of the CDS is not a reliable guide to what the university currently charges. Families should use the net price calculator rather than the sticker, which for an aid-eligible household is a poor predictor of anything.

Retention and graduation

Persistence is strong and steady. First-year retention has run between 95 and 97 percent across the window, at 95.2 percent for the most recent cohort. The six-year graduation rate for the 2019 entering cohort was 90.3 percent, with Pell recipients at 86.7 percent and non-recipients at 91.4 percent, a gap under five points. Four-year completion for that cohort was about 71 percent.

First-year retention and graduation rates, most recent reporting. Source: USC Common Data Sets, Sections B4 through B22.

The classroom numbers help explain those outcomes. USC reports a student-faculty ratio of 9 to 1, and in Fall 2025 it ran 534 undergraduate sections enrolling fewer than ten students and 1,394 enrolling ten to nineteen, against only 108 sections of a hundred or more. For a university of nearly 46,000 total students, the undergraduate teaching pattern looks more like a much smaller institution.

Beyond the numbers

Two structural facts sit outside the admissions table and shape the place. The first is that USC is majority graduate. Its 25,047 graduate students outnumber its 20,768 undergraduates, a ratio almost no peer private university matches, and it means undergraduates share a campus with an enormous professional and master’s population.

The second is the pair of choices described at the start. Adding non-binding early action while continuing to refuse both early decision and a waiting list is a distinctive combination. Early action gives applicants an earlier answer without a commitment, which is favorable to students and yields the university nothing binding in return. Declining a waitlist removes a tool that most selective universities now rely on heavily, and it puts the burden on getting the regular round right the first time. The 16 percent jump in offers for Fall 2025 is what that constraint looks like in practice.

What the five-year record means for applicants

The most useful thing an applicant can take from this file is that USC decides almost everything at once. There is no binding round to signal commitment, no waitlist to hope for, and no credit for demonstrated interest, so the application submitted by the deadline is the entire case. Early action is worth using for the earlier answer and the reduced risk of a late scramble, but it does not carry the statistical advantage that a binding plan would.

The school matters more than the university-wide rate. An applicant to Cinematic Arts, Thornton, Roski, or Kaufman is being evaluated on a portfolio or audition by faculty in that discipline, and should plan the creative supplement as the center of the application rather than an attachment to it. An applicant to Marshall or Viterbi is competing inside the two largest funnels on campus. The 11 percent headline is an average across processes that have little to do with each other.

On testing, treat the optional label literally and the very important rating seriously: a score inside or above the 1470 to 1540 band helps, and a weaker one is better withheld. On cost, ignore the sticker. USC meets all or nearly all demonstrated need, covers tuition entirely below an $80,000 income line, and has raised its average package by more than $32,000 in five years. That gap between the published price and the actual price is the single most misread number in the entire data set.