OXYTALK Photos by Marc Campos | 1999 photo by Don Milici
Cuseo stands outside Collins House, the first stop on campus for prospective students and their families each year. (The patio area was recently reopened for limited visits for admitted members of the Class of ’25.)
Charting a Different Path
Cuseo in 1999.
Vince Cuseo has been instrumental to the success of Oxy’s admission efforts for the last 22 years— and his commitment to Oxy’s mission can’t be measured by test scores
34 OCCIDENTAL MAGAZINE SPRING 2021
In 1999, Vince Cuseo was director of admission at Grinnell College, the highly ranked liberal arts college in Iowa—a job he loved. Yet when the associate dean position at Occidental opened up, he applied for the job, even though it represented a step down on the organizational chart. “I’ve never been one to be so wedded to a position title,” Cuseo explains, and Vice President for Admission and Financial Aid Bill Tingley, with whom he had worked previously at Stanford, “was someone I respected and admired.” Like so many others, Cuseo found the prospect of working in Los Angeles attractive. And there was one more contributing factor: “Frankly, as a single person who was getting older, the options were limited in smalltown Iowa.” Approximately 110,000 student applications later, Cuseo—now a married father of teenage twins—is credited with more than doubling Oxy’s applicant pool while