The University Park campus is in the West Adams district of South Los Angeles, 2 miles southwest of Downtown Los Angeles. The campus' boundaries are Jefferson Boulevard on the north and northeast, Figueroa Street on the southeast, Exposition Boulevard on the south, and Vermont Avenue on the west. Since the 1960s, through campus vehicle traffic has been banned. The University Park campus is within walking distance to Los Angeles landmarks such as the Shrine Auditorium, Staples Center, and Los Angeles Coliseum. Most buildings are in the Romanesque style, although some dormitories, engineering buildings, and physical sciences labs are of various Modernist styles (especially two large Brutalist dormitories at the campus' northern edge) that sharply contrast with the predominantly red-brick campus. Widney Alumni House, built in 1880, is the oldest university building in Southern California. In recent years the campus has been renovated to remove the vestiges of old roads and replace them with traditional university quads and gardens.

USC was developed under two master plans which were drafted and implemented some 40 years apart. The first was prepared by The Parkinsons in the early 1920s, which guided much of the campus' early construction and established its Romanesque style and 45-degree building orientation. The second and largest master plan was prepared in 1960 under the supervision of USC alumnus William Pereira. This plan annexed a great deal of the surrounding city and many of the older non-university structures within the new boundaries were leveled. Most of the Pereira buildings were constructed in the 1970s. Pereira maintained a predominantly red-brick architecture for the new buildings, but infused them with his trademark techno-modernism stylings.

USC's role in making visible and sustained improvements in the neighborhoods surrounding both the University Park and Health Sciences campuses earned it the distinction of College of the Year 2000 by the TIME/Princeton Review College Guide. Roughly half of the university's students volunteer in community-service programs in neighborhoods around campus and throughout Los Angeles. These outreach programs, as well as previous administrations' commitment to remaining in South Los Angeles amid widespread calls to move the campus following the 1965 Watts Riots, are credited for the safety of the university during the 1992 Los Angeles Riots. (That the university emerged from the riots completely unscathed is all the more remarkable in light of the complete destruction of several strip malls in the area, including one just across Vermont Avenue from the campus' western entrance). The ZIP code for USC is 90089 and the surrounding University Park community is 90007.

As well, USC has an endowment of $2.7 billion and also is allocated $430 million per year in sponsored research. USC became the only university to receive five separate nine-figure gifts — two separate gifts of $100 million from Ambassador Walter Annenberg to create the Annenberg Center for Communication, $112.5 million from Alfred Mann to establish the Alfred E. Mann Institute for Biomedical Engineering, $110 million from the W. M. Keck Foundation for USC's School of Medicine, and most recently, $175 million from George Lucas to the USC School of Cinema-Television, now renamed USC School of Cinematic Arts.

Major new facilities opened with the infusion of new money including the:

The USC Medical Center

The Thomas and Dorothy Leavey Library

The USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center expansion

The Zilkha Neurogenetic Institute

The International Residential College at Parkside

The Marshall School of Business Popovich Hall.

Galen Center - home to USC Basketball and USC Volleyball.

USC is a private corporation, and is ultimately controlled by a Board of Trustees, with roughly 50 voting members and several Life Trustees, Honorary Trustees, and Trustees Emeritus who do not vote. Voting members of the Board of Trustees are elected for five-year terms. One fifth of the Trustees stand for re-election each year, and votes are cast only by the Trustees not standing for election. Trustees tend to be high-ranking executives of large corporations (both domestic and international), successful alumni, members of the upper echelons of university administration or some combination of the three.

The university administration consists of a President, a Provost, several Vice Presidents of various departments, a treasurer, a Chief Information Officer, and an athletic director. The President is Steven B. Sample and the Provost is C.L. Max Nikias.

The College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences, The Graduate School, and the 18 Professional Schools are each lead by an Academic Dean. USC occasionally awards emeritus titles to former administrators. There are currently six Administrators Emeriti.

The University of Southern California is well known for its professional schools in communication, law, dentistry, medicine, business, engineering, journalism, public policy, and architecture, as well as for its School of Cinematic Arts. Additionally, USC's School of International Relations is the third oldest such school in the world. It also offers the Master of Professional Writing Program.

The incoming freshman class for the 2005 fall term had an average unadjusted GPA of 3.8 out of 4.0 and an average SAT score of 1368 out of 1600. USC has been a member of the Association of American Universities since 1969 and is the oldest private research university in the American West. *

The School of Cinematic Arts, the first in the country and perhaps USC's most famous school, confers degrees in critical studies, screenwriting, film production, and film producing. In 2001, the film school added an Interactive Media Division studying video games, virtual reality, and mobile media. The school is supported by its famous alumni, whose ranks include such well-known graduates as George Lucas, Ron Howard, Robert Zemeckis, John Milius, Ben Burtt, and Bryan Singer. Famous American actor Will Ferrell also attended USC, but received a degree from the Annenberg School for Communication. On September 19, 2006, USC announced that George Lucas had donated $175 million USD to expand the film school, it was the largest single donation to USC (and its fifth over $100 million).

A Department of Architecture was established at USC within the Roski School of Fine Arts in 1916, the first in Southern California. This small department grew rapidly with the help of the Allied Architects of Los Angeles. A separate School of Architecture was organized in September 1925. The School of Architecture is world famous for its strong focus on the design aspect of the architectural field. The school has been home to teachers such as Richard Neutra, Ralph Knowles, A. Quincy Jones, William Pereira and Pierre Koenig. The school of architecture is also home to notable alumni Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Raphael Soriano, Gregory Ain, and Pierre Koenig. The school has two Pritzker Prize winners, the highest award in architecture (often referred to as "the Nobel of architecture"), and is tied with Yale for the most American winners.

On March 02, 2004, the USC School of Engineering, headed by Dean Max Nikias, was renamed to the Andrew and Erna Viterbi School of Engineering. This was done to honor Qualcomm founder Andrew Viterbi and his wife Erna, who had recently donated $52 million to the school. The gift was the largest ever to rename an existing school of engineering. The Viterbi School subsequently received other major gifts including Silicon Valley venture capitalist Mark Stevens and his wife Mary who created the USC Stevens Institute in 2004; real estate developer Daniel J. Epstein who named the Epstein Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering in 2002; Energy Corporation of America CEO John Mork and his family who named the Mork Family Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science in 2005; Ken Klein, CEO and president of Wind River Systems, who established the Klein Institute for Undergraduate Engineering Life, also in 2005; and Ming Hsieh, founder of Cogent Inc., who named the Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering in 2006 with a $35 million gift, the largest ever to name such a department.

The Annenberg School for Communication is among the best in the nation, being one of the two communication programs in the country endowed by Walter Annenberg (the other is at the University of Pennsylvania). The school of journalism features a core curriculum that requires students to devote themselves equally to print, broadcast and online media for the first year of study. This approach promises a breadth of knowledge across various journalistic media. USC's Annenberg School for Communication enjoys a massive endowment.

USC annually elects members to Undergraduate Student Government (formerly known as Student Senate), which is incorporated with the USC Student Affairs department. The Undergraduate Student Government President and Vice-President are currently Sam Gordon and Sahil Chaudry, elected in the spring of 2006.

Modeled after the United States government, the Undergraduate Student Government consists of executive, legislative, and judicial branches, along with a programming branch (commonly referred to as "Program Board"). The executive branch consists of students appointed by the elected leadership and is charged with coordinating publications, events, and efforts to solve problems voiced by the student body. The legislative branch, the only branch fully elected by the students, represents the voice of the student body to university officials and legislates change to some limited aspects of university policy. The judicial branch ensures that all operations within Undergraduate Student Government are within the bounds of the organization's governing documentation.

Program Board aims to provide USC students with education and information through a multitude of social, political, and entertaining events. Assemblies and committees, in conjunction with elected and appointed Senate representatives, attempt to program these events in line with the desires of the paying student body. All Undergraduate Student Government activities are funded by the student activity fee, which the President and Treasurer have control over setting and which the Senate approves.

During the week prior to the traditional USC-UCLA rivalry football game, the Tommy Trojan statue is covered in duct tape to prevent the spray-painting of UCLA colors on the statue, as was commonplace several decades ago.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has nominated at least one USC alumnus every year since the inception of the Academy Awards in 1929.

When USC first opened, tuition was $15.00 per term, and students were not allowed to leave town without the knowledge and consent of the university president.

USC's first class valedictorian was a woman, Minnie C. Miltimore, class of 1884.

Before they were named Trojans in 1912, USC athletic teams were called the Fighting Methodists, as well as the Wesleyans.

USC's Schools of Medicine and Pharmacy are the first and oldest in Southern California.

The southwest corner of the Pueblo of Los Angeles, the original land grant given by the King of Spain in 1781, is at Figueroa Street and Exposition Boulevard, across the street from USC.

A gargoyle monkey at the top of Student Union thumbs his nose at the bust of past university president, Rufus B. von KleinSmid because of a quarrel had with the architect over the building.

The USC marching band is the only one in the U.S. that has earned a platinum record. In fact, the band's earned two for Tusk.

USC is the largest private employer in the City of Los Angeles, and the third largest in the state of California

Since 1912, USC is the only university in the world to have a gold medal-winning athlete in every summer Olympiad.

USC physicians serve more than one million patients each year. *

In the British comedy The Fast Show, one recurring character was Prof. Denzil Dexter from the University of Southern California, who carried out pointless bad experiments.