A Growing Corps of ‘Capital Campuses’

The University of Southern California celebrated the opening of its new campus in Washington, D.C., last month with the kind of fanfare usually reserved for a Trojan football victory. The Spirit of Troy marching band played on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, after which dignitaries and university leaders gathered with hundreds of supporters at the $50 million, 60,000-square-foot Capital Campus in Dupont Circle, just two Metro stops away from Congress and the White House. The “Trojan Embassy,” as USC president Carol Folt has called it, represents the latest in a growing list of higher education institutions expanding their presence in D.C. Over 40 U.S. colleges and universities have a physical presence in the nation’s capital, ranging from Johns Hopkins University—which lies just an hour north in Baltimore—to Pepperdine University, a small Christian institution across the continent in Malibu, Calif.