Pre-tech days – USC

As an undergraduate at USC in LA in 1973 I was fortunate to be awarded a WorkStudy grant. This was an additional scholarship where you earned money working in some department at the college. I was assigned to the Office of Admission.

The office had 6 or 7 counselors who read files and made recommendations on admission that would then be voted on by a larger panel. The university received thousands and thousands of applications both for undergraduate studies as well as the very prestigious graduate degrees in film, law, communications, dentistry, business and gerontology. All these went through our office.

There was a team of about 6 work-study students, and we took turns opening the mountains of mail, starting a file for a new application, photocopying applications to send parts to the various departments and assorted odd jobs. 

The tens of thousands of applications were stored in hundreds of three drawer metal filing cabinets that filled one huge room in the office. Different colored flags were placed in the file folders to indicate the status of the file. Applicants had to send transcripts, recommendations, testing, and sometimes financial aid forms to make their file complete. When it was complete it was delivered to one of the counselors for reading and a recommended decision.

The procedure was that the transcripts which had come from the student’s school would be opened by an official person, stamped officially received and dated, and then put in a bin for filing. A filing person would then go to the hundreds of alphabetical drawers, look to see if there was an active application, put it in that file folder and if that was the final one, change the flag color and deliver it to the counselor. Many students had their transcripts sent to multiple colleges where they ultimately did not apply so it was possible not to find an application file. In that case, you would create a new file and place the transcript in there to wait for an application.

USC had made a reputation for working with the local neighborhoods in hiring for non-technical jobs. The gardeners, maintenance people, security guards and food staff at the dining areas were mostly all locals. USC was located in a very economically depressed area where street crime and violence was not uncommon. It was kind of an island of relative safety in an otherwise depressed ghetto. When the Rodney King riots broke out in the 80s, the local residents lined the university themselves and protected the campus from the rioters because they valued the relationship.

In our office there was a group of young women from the neighborhood who were extremely friendly and helpful overall. They were not students, however, but office work was a prized position.

One day in September I was given the job of filing the transcripts. Usually this was done by the local women, but that day for some reason they were not available. My supervisor had gotten a call from a well-connected legacy family that had a student with the last name Stevenson applying. They were sure that all the transcripts and recs were there and asked personally if someone could check on the status of that file.

With the first and last name I thumbed for the possible application and transcript. Strangely several of the files with applications and transcripts in that area were not strictly in alphabetical order. That puzzled me. So I went a dozen one way and the other in the drawer. What I suddenly realized horrified me. In just this drawer there were “Stevenson” “Stevensen” “Steveson” Steverson” etc all jumbled together.  I found two copies of his transcript already there and neither was in a properly spelled file, and there was already an application file waiting for the transcript. I completed the file and transferred it to the counselor, putting both transcript copies inside. She asked my why there were two and why we had not brought the file earlier. The first transcript has been stamped two months before!

I went back and took the entire drawer to a table. I laid out all the files and started to inspect. Many were just transcripts with misspelled names, many were not even close to being filed correctly, and I was quickly able to complete three more files.

I looked at the filing room. There were at least 200 drawers. If even a few of these were like this, there were hundreds and hundreds of applications that had been stalled and people had been calling and sending additional copies over and over. Without some personal clout they would have been told that their file was not complete and to send another copy of the transcript. 

The next day I watched as the local women again returned to their job with the transcripts. I was shocked. They were sitting in a circle, talking and chatting, and they casually took a transcript, scribbled a name on the file folder and made stacks. Then later they walked to the file room and just dumped them almost at random in one of the drawers of that letter. 

I immediately went to my supervisor and explained what I had discovered. She was like many of the staff who were wives of graduate students in medicine or law, who lived in grad student housing and who worked for the school. She did not want to make a fuss and we talked about what the local women could do instead of filing going forward. But the big question was how to sort out the hundreds of drawers and thousands of applications that were stalled.

She quietly made that my permanent job for the year.  She did not want this made more public. I would try to think of some name that would be problematic like “Smith” or “Lee” or “Thompson” and go to that area. There was almost no way to fix all the drawers given the manpower. I completed dozens and dozens of applications that otherwise would have stalled, but clearly was not able to do thousands more.

I often wondered about all the lives that were altered by not getting accepted to USC because of this low tech nightmare procedure.