Thanks for the help. These are good points. I'm mostly interested in policy analysis and ways to examine problems in a variety of different fields (government, IR, public, private, etc). While I don't have a fellowship offer from these schools, I would get an in-state tuition reduction from Texas, making it about 5K per year. I guess I'm basically trying to see if there are any convincing reasons why I should choose either USC or American over UT, because if there aren't, I'm leaning towards Texas and would be happy there...