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USC to eliminate tuition for families making under $80,000

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USC just made a $30 million promise to thousands of families who couldn’t afford it before.

The University of Southern California announced Thursday morning that incoming first-year students from families earning $80,000 or less annually will pay no tuition at all, starting with the fall 2020 class. President Carol L. Folt unveiled the plan alongside a second change that strips primary home equity out of USC’s financial aid formula — a fix aimed squarely at families priced out by Southern California’s real estate boom. The announcement lands roughly a year into Folt’s tenure, as USC works to rebuild trust after the 2019 Varsity Blues admissions scandal rocked the campus.

• Families making $80,000 or less per year will see full tuition covered for incoming domestic first-year students beginning fall 2020 and spring 2021.
• USC will no longer count primary home equity in financial aid calculations, and eligible students could receive up to $45,000 more in grants over four years.
• The university projects one in three incoming first-year students will qualify, expanding total undergraduate aid by more than $30 million annually once fully phased in across four classes, helping over 4,000 students.

The Numbers Behind the Announcement

USC’s undergraduate tuition ran $57,256 for the 2019–2020 academic year, and total costs — tuition, housing, food, and books combined — topped $77,000. For a school with a price tag like that, the $80,000 income cutoff isn’t symbolic; it’s designed to reach families who make more than they’d like to admit but still can’t clear six figures a year in tuition alone.

Provost Charles Zukoski framed the threshold as deliberate, tying it to the University of California system’s existing Blue and Gold Opportunity Plan and noting it sits above both the national and California median household income. That alignment matters — it puts USC’s aid floor in the same territory as the UC system’s public schools, something a private university with USC’s price tag hasn’t historically matched.

“We’re opening the door wider to make a USC education possible for talented students from all walks of life.”

Required Qualifications for Eligibility

The policy is narrower than a blanket tuition giveaway. It applies only to incoming domestic first-year students — not continuing undergraduates already enrolled, not transfer students, and not international applicants. That distinction matters for families weighing whether to apply this cycle versus families whose kids are already on campus and won’t see a change to their bill.

The home equity change is arguably the sneakier fix. Financial aid formulas that count home value against a family have long penalized middle-income households sitting on paper wealth from soaring property values but no actual cash flow to show for it — a familiar problem across California’s housing market and a factor that’s shaped broader debates over the state’s affordability, from economics coverage to local housing fights. By removing that variable, USC is betting more homeowning families in the $80,000-to-$149,000 range will actually qualify for meaningful aid rather than getting disqualified on paper.

Funding It Without Raising Tuition

Folt was explicit that the expanded aid comes from philanthropic donations, not a tuition hike passed on to everyone else. That’s a notable choice for a university trying to reset its public image — raising prices to fund a headline-grabbing affordability initiative would have undercut the entire message. Instead, USC is leaning on its donor base to cover the gap as the program scales toward that $30 million annual figure.

The timing isn’t incidental. USC has spent the past year working to move past Varsity Blues, the admissions bribery scheme that implicated wealthy parents and exposed how money could buy a side door into elite schools. A tuition-free pathway for lower-income families is the kind of concrete policy that pushes back against that narrative directly, even if USC officials haven’t framed it explicitly as a response to the scandal.

Applications for the fall 2020 class are already in the pipeline, which means the first wave of students benefiting from this plan will be moving into dorms by late August — the real test of whether USC’s $30 million bet translates into a meaningfully different incoming class.