In my day (late '80s / early '90s), USC was the place you went to if you couldn't get into the University of California schools, and if your parents were rich enough to afford it.

Keep in mind that UC schools were cheap then, so the difference in tuition was yuuuuuuuuuuuge (it's still big, but not nearly as pronounced). I paid $1800 in tuition for a YEAR at UCSB in 1990-91.

Anyway, two things have vastly changed since then.

First, UC schools are no longer cheap. This was already rapidly changing as I went through college.

Second, USC has real standards now.

At one time, USC's dirty little secret was that the admissions standards were laughably low. They never admitted this, and in fact shoveled you BS at college fairs that "4.0 students sometimes get rejected", but every so often a magazine or newspaper article would come out exposing the truth. This was way before you could search shit like this on the internet.

I'm not sure when it changed, but it did. Now USC is fairly tough to get into. It's no Harvard by any means, but it's no longer just a place for mediocre kids with rich parents.

This scandal doesn't surprise me. College admissions has been a joke for a very long time, dating back before I was born.