Sierra Williams is one of more than 3,000 new freshmen at the University of Southern California this fall. She is majoring in biomedical engineering, and, if the technical track doesn’t work out, she says she plans to become a doctor.
Where Williams stands out from the majority of her peers is her familiarity with the campus. That’s because she has already spent four years in high school taking classes there as a student scholar with USC’s Neighborhood Academic Initiative (NAI). “It’s pretty easy to navigate my way through campus,” she said.
NAI’s home base is the Foshay Learning Center, not far from USC’s main campus in southern Los Angeles. Williams, and 19 other NAI scholars, graduated from Foshay this spring and transferred to USC in the fall.
That cohort of 20 students makes Foshay one of the top feeder schools for USC, which enrolled its most competitive freshman class this fall. USC took only 18 percent of its applicants. Incoming freshmen have an average GPA of 3.73 and scored in the 95th percentile on standardized tests, according to a USC press release published on Thursday.
Foshay ranked third overall for the number of students it sent to USC. Just ahead of Foshay was Palos Verdes High School, located in a tony neighborhood overlooking the Pacific; and Loyola High School, a Jesuit prep school for young men and the oldest continuously run educational institution in the region.
Compared to the other top feeder schools, Foshay has far fewer resources at its disposal. Located in inner-city LA, Foshay has a high school student body of just under 700. Of those students, 87 percent are low income, and the majority are Latino or Black.
But Foshay does have the NAI, a powerful tool in its arsenal. NAI has become a game changer for inner-city students.
