USC has been churning out great filmmakers since Douglas Fairbanks, Darryl Zanuck and Irving Thalberg were teaching classes there. From James Ivory ('57) to Robert Zemeckis ('73) to Doug Liman?('92) and up to Ryan Coogler ('11) — they all learned how to point ?a camera on this Exposition Park campus. For Ride Along director Tim Story ('91), that history was one of the school's big selling points. "It was my admiration for George Lucas," he explains why he applied, referring to class of 1969's most famous pupil (also most generous; Lucas donated another $10 million last year). "That it was 20 minutes away from?where I [grew up] didn't hurt either." This year, the school got ?a new animation director — Teresa Cheng, who's worked at Warner Bros., DreamWorks and Lucasfilm — and teamed with the State Department to launch the Middle East Media Initiative to support collaborations with filmmakers in Saudi Arabia (which just lifted a 35-year ban on movie theaters). But of all the things USC has going for it — including its master classes (Lisa Kudrow taught one on comedy this year), its state-of-the-art VR Lab and its program for video game designers — the thing that keeps this school on the very top of this list, for the sixth year in a row, is its world-class faculty. Says Planet of the Apes scribe Amanda Silver ('89), "There isn't a day that goes by that I don't refer back to what I learned with those teachers."

Tuition $55,320 (undergrad); $33,981 to $44,837 (grad) per year

Alumni John Singleton, Shonda Rhimes