Aug. 30, 1999

LOS ANGELES - The University of Southern California has been chosen as "College of the Year" by the 2000 edition of the Time/Princeton Review College Guide.

Editors of the annual guide, a co-publication of Time magazine and the Princeton Review, said they chose USC because of the remarkable bonds the university has forged with local schools, community residents, police, businesses and community organizations. The guide, published Aug. 23, is available on newsstands and in bookstores now.

"More institutions might do well to emulate USC's enlightened self-interest," according to the guidebook editors. "For not only has the 'hood dramatically improved, but so has the university."

USC has seen its undergraduate applications nearly double over the last few years, according to a six-page article penned by Time national correspondent Margot Hornblower and included in the Time/Princeton guide.

"We are enrolling the most academically accomplished freshman class in our history," said Joseph Allen, USC dean of admissions and financial aid. "We are now in that rarefied group of universities known in admissions circles as 'highly selective.'"

Time/Princeton editors cited the university's model of service learning ÷ the practice of applying academic theory to real-life situations through public service ÷ as their main reason for choosing USC as college of the year.

The guide's recognition validates the great work done by residents living near the university, as well as thousands of neighborhood institutions, USC students, faculty and staff members, said USC President Steven B. Sample.

"At the heart of USC's community outreach is a respectful partnership between the university and the people, organizations and institutions around us," Sample said. "All have been working hard to achieve common goals ÷ great public schools, a safe and attractive environment, and economic and academic opportunity.

"USC's employees and students have taken up the challenge to give of both their time and money to causes in the community," Sample added. "Together they have volunteered hundreds of thousands of hours in the neighborhoods closest to USC's University Park Campus near downtown Los Angeles and its Health Sciences Campus in East Los Angeles. Since 1994, faculty and staff have given more than $1.5 million to the Good Neighbors Campaign, our annual fund-raising drive for the university's outreach programs."

USC has one of the most ambitious social-outreach programs of any university in the nation, according to Hornblower's article. "The intense focus, with one program layering on another, has woven a safety net around the children, their families and their teachers," she wrote.

Hornblower investigated about a dozen of the more than 200 community programs with which USC is affiliated. Her article singled out USC's Neighborhood Academic Initiative for special praise, profiling 17-year-old Marlena Chambers as one of the 350 South Central Los Angeles youngsters enrolled in the college preparatory program. The African-American teenager said she is working hard in hope of qualifying for a $120,000 USC scholarship when she graduates from high school.

"As the backlash against affirmative action gathers force, universities promote 'outreach' to continue attracting black and Hispanic students," Hornblower wrote. "But USC's effort goes far beyond mailing brochures to inner-city high school counselors and hoping that qualified applicants will materialize."

USC's commitment to work with its neighbors is both broad and deep, the Rev. Cecil Murray, senior minister of the nearby First African Methodist Episcopal Church, is quoted as saying. "USC goes out and puts their hands in yours and brings you to them," he said.

USC's emphasis on combining academics and service has helped the university recruit some of the world's best and brightest students, said Jane G. Pisano, USC's senior vice president for external relations.

"We began marketing the university as a place for students to live in an urban environment and make change," Dr. Pisano said in Hornblower's article. "It proved to be an enormously effective recruiting strategy: you can do good and do well at the same time."

USC is the only university in history to have received three individual gifts of $100 million or more. The most recent was the Keck Foundation's gift of $110 million to the School of Medicine. It followed a donation of $120 million by Ambassador Walter H. Annenberg to establish the USC Annenberg Center for Communication and a $100 million gift from Alfred E. Mann to establish the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering.