According to a recent impact report prepared for the University of Southern California, USC generated about $2.1 million in direct economic activity in 2008. If conventional multipliers are added in, USC spun off nearly $5 billion in economic benefits to the city, the county, and the region through wages, capital construction, operating expenditures, and the estimated half-billion dollars that USC students spend each year.
That’s really big.
USC also is the biggest private-sector employer in Los Angeles County, with just under 27,000 employees. Most of those jobs are for non-academic workers; most of them live in the ZIP Codes of the central and southern neighborhoods of the city. USC is a mainstay of blue-collar L.A.
It’s also an “industry” that’s uniquely place bound. USC is branded, after all, with the name of this place. (Indeed, the idea that there is a distinct locality called Southern California and the founding of the university in 1880 are closely linked.)
USC’s reach may be global and its resources increasingly digital, but the university is a “brick and mortar” presence that spent $130 million last year to lay even more bricks and pour even more mortar on a campus that is at the margin of what had been the city’s second suburban boom. (And USC had helped then to propel real estate sales, as the founding of nearly every college in L.A. has since.)
It would be hard to quantify, but the USC brand also depends on the seductive qualities – real and imagined – of this place. A four-year course of study in Buffalo or Tulsa (both wonderful, in their way) may not seem as appealing as four years here. We’ve not yet reached the point of outsourcing our dreams, though we may one day.
As the industrial core of Los Angeles hollowed out in the 1980s, it was assumed that a “new economy” of financial services and entertainment production would profitably replace smokestacks and assembly lines. Until we discovered that insurance and banking didn’t need or want our sunshine and that TV and movies could be made cheaply in Toronto.
USC and other universities – both public and private – are the workshops that we still have, still needing the qualities of Southern California for at least part of what brings 20-year-olds here to spend their parents' money. Unlike aerospace or even Hollywood, USC will be here for the long haul – brick by brick by brick.
The image on this page was taken by Flickr user Sklathill. It was used under a Creative Commons license.
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USC as the largest private-enterprise employer in the SoCal region? Fascinating. Still, I wish the University would do a little more to reach out to the surrounding community by way of support for local neighborhoods. The juxtaposition between USC and the streets surrounding it remains quite jarring.
True enough. But . . . Aren't thousands of jobs the kind of support that the neiborhood needs?