USC ranks first in California and fifth in the nation for the most international students during the 2023-2024 academic year, according to new data from the Institute of International Education. Students from abroad have made finding community a key part of their university experience.
Open Doors ranked USC as the leading university for international students from the 2001-2002 until the 2012-2013 academic year. While USC has since dropped in the rankings for international students, the total number of international students across U.S. universities has increased. When USC was last ranked number one, the university had 9,840 international students. Now, in fifth place, it hosts 17,469.
According to USC, the university’s international community comes from over 130 countries. After filling out the Common Application and USC’s university-specific application, these students must be approved before applying for an F-1 visa. After that, students must undergo the visa process in their country of origin, according to the U.S. Department of State Bureau of Consular Affairs.
“As an international student, things are always more complicated, and a lot of time you do have to dig through all the resources by yourself,” said Nicole Yeh, an international student from Taipei, Taiwan.
Yeh is a senior majoring in business administration and is the assistant director of the International Student Assembly (ISA) at USC. She said that ISA helped her connect to other international students and familiarize herself with other cultures.
“Making friends with other international students is also very helpful, because we all go through very similar processes, like visa stuff,” Yeh said. “You have to be on top of the documents.”
ISA aims to bring international students together by holding events ranging from trivia nights and trips to speaker events featuring voices such as Icelandic-Chinese singer Laufey. The organization works closely with the Undergraduate Student Government and the Office of International Services to connect with the international community at USC. Organizations like ISA also provides support for international students in navigating their American college experience.
“We advocate for international students through supporting them on the resource side of things… We also help increase diversity awareness,” Yeh said.
Mia Alonso, a freshman international student from Mexico City, said that she decided to apply to schools abroad because her peers were also applying to universities in the United States.
“It was an American system, and so it’s very normalized over there for seniors to apply elsewhere, to go abroad, so to the U.S. or Europe,” said Alonso.
For her, USC represented the college experience she hoped to have.
“I was just very drawn to the typical college experience with the football games and the dorms or the frats, and me being able to meet a lot of people from everywhere,” she said. “Which, I think, is very different from how college works back in Mexico.”
For other international students, studying abroad can mean living the reality of what they’ve seen in popular media.
“I thought it was going to be like the movies. I thought [L.A.] was going to be cleaner, but it’s actually not,” said Hsaio Jungteng, a sophomore from Taiwan studying computer science and business administration.
This week is International Education Week, and USC is hosting various events for international students. A full list of the scheduled programming can be found here.