Undergraduate Education

6,187 undergraduates pursue a major in the College.

For the 2007–08 academic year:
More than 17,000 students applied.

Statistics for the admitted class:
Average SAT Score: 2063
Average GPA: 4.11

Average class size: 26 students

Undergraduates choose from more than 60 College majors and nearly 80 College minors.

Graduate Education

1,452 full-time graduate students are studying and conducting research in the College.

There are 25 Ph.D. programs. Programs are offered across a spectrum of disciplines, including natural, physical and social sciences, and the humanities.

Forty percent of USC doctoral students are enrolled in the College.

Faculty

Approximately 500 full-time faculty teach in 33 academic departments and programs.
In the College, tenure-track faculty teach all core undergraduate courses.

Notable faculty in the College include George A. Olah, Nobel Prize Winner; T.C. Boyle, American Academy of Arts and Letters; Antonio Damasio, internationally recognized leader in neuroscience; Carol Muske-Dukes, California Poet Laureate; and Michael Waterman, pioneer in computational biology and bioinformatics.

10 American Academy of Arts and Sciences Fellows

10 National Academy of Sciences Members

28 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellows

Did You Know?

• Every College faculty member teaches undergraduate courses, even Distinguished and University Professors. (USC President Steven B. Sample regularly teaches a course on leadership in the College.)
• Thirteen of USC's last 16 valedictorians majored in the College. (1992–2008)
• In 2008, nine out of the 10 USC Renaissance Scholars had a College major and/or minor.
• Almost 75 percent of the USC Associates Awards in Excellence in Teaching go to USC College faculty.
• By the time a USC College student graduates, they've participated in three to four internships on average.
• USC ranks third in the world when it comes to citations to papers on earthquake research; behind the U.S. Geological Survey (No. 1) and Caltech (No. 2) and ahead of UCLA (No. 4) and the University of Tokyo (No. 5).
• The USC Center of Excellence in Genomic Science (CEGS), an interdisciplinary center funded for five years by $18.7 million in grants from the National Institutes of Health, is one of only nine such centers in the nation. CEGS is playing a leading role in the effort to turn the promise of genomics into advances in understanding human disease and evolution.
• The College is home to one of the first Ph.D. programs in literature and creative writing. There are upwards of 80 applications each year, for only four spots.
• In January 2006, the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation became part of USC College.  Established by Steven Spielberg, this collection preserves testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust. The collection at the USC Shoah Foundation Institute for Visual History and Education is the largest of its kind, comprising 52,000 audio-visual testimonies in 32 languages.
• USC College's Michael Waterman, University Professor and holder of the USC Associates Chair in Natural Sciences, pioneered computational biology, a revolutionary field combining biological sciences, mathematics and computer science. Computational biology has grown increasingly important in the age of the human genome project.
• Physics professor Eugene Bickers is known as "Professor Firewalker" for walking across hot coals to demonstrate heat transfer for his Physics 100 class.
• U.S.News & World Report ranked USC among the Top College Academic Programs in Service Learning 2006, recognizing initiatives such as the College's Joint Educational Project (JEP). One of the nation's oldest and largest service-learning programs, JEP celebrates its 35th anniversary in 2006-7.
• Caleb Finch, the ARCO/William F. Kieschnick Professor in the Neurobiology of Aging, was voted one of America's top 50 innovators over 50 by the American Association of Retired People. He revolutionized the field of gerontology in the late 1960s when he demonstrated that aging in mammals could be delayed.
• The history department is home to three former presidents of the American Studies Association: George Sanchez, Lois Banner and Karen Halttunen.
• Neuroscientist Michael Quick, USC College's executive vice dean, works with the Getty Research Institute on a project to apply biological tools so centuries-old art and furnishings can be preserved.
• The College has the largest collection of ancient Dead Sea Scrolls in the world. Using sophisticated photography and computer imaging techniques, a team of scholars involved in the InscriptiFact Project decipher ancient tablets, writings and other artifacts that have been illegible through the centuries.
• Between 1981 and 1999, Larry Swanson, Michel Baudry and Richard Thompson were among the 100 most highly cited neuroscientists in the world.
• The College's School of International Relations is the second oldest in the U.S. and the third oldest in the world, celebrating its 80th anniversary in 2004.
• Two English professors were finalists for the 2003 National Book Awards. T. C. Boyle and Carol Muske-Dukes were nominated in fiction and poetry, respectively, for Drop City and Sparrow. (USC College was the only institution to boast two nominees.)
• Two College students won the prestigious Marshall scholarship in 2003.