I attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles beginning in the fall of 1981. I received my masters degree in Geophysics in 1985. USC is a private university.
Tuition is very expensive.
I wouldn't have been able to attend if I had to pay for it myself. Fortunately, I was a TA for the first two years, and an RA the third year. The fourth year I had already started a job with Union Oil in downtown Los Angeles. Also while at USC, I got paid for doing various little computer project for people in the department. The most rewarding was setting up a computer to digitize the shape of sand grains for Fourier analysis .