Choosing a safe campus: it's harder than you think

September 25, 12:27 PMCollege Admissions ExaminerLauren Starkey

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The Daily Beast website, in what appears to be a timely attempt to cash in the on the tragic death of Annie Le at Yale a few weeks ago, has come up with college rankings all their own. “How Safe is Your College” purports to show how schools compare with one another on student safety. It determined that Emerson College in Boston is the nation’s least safe school. Understandably, Emerson’s spokesperson, and current and former students are speaking out about the dubious distinction, and the controversy is growing.

I asked Gary Margolis, Managing Partner of Margolis, Healy & Associates (a firm specializing in higher education and K-12 safety and security) to explain the methodology used by the Daily Beast to rank colleges. Margolis has a 20-year career in public safety and is the former Chief of Police at the University of Vermont. “The rankings are based on the Clery Act, which is a consumer protection law often misconstrued as a security law.” [Some background: the Clery Act was signed in 1990 after a Lehigh student was raped and murdered in her dorm after 38 other violent crimes on the campus during the previous three years went unreported.]

“The law requires every college that participates in the federal student financial aid program to share their crime statistics, including those that take place in the ‘surrounding community.’ It sounds like a good thing, but you need to understand what you’re looking at. Schools with police departments [as opposed to contracted security guards] often do a better job of collecting the data that the Clery Act specifies. Those schools will have more reported incidents because they’ve kept track of them. Does that mean schools with security guards have less crime? Absolutely not. But there’s no way of knowing that by looking at the reported numbers.”

Here are additional problems with the data, according to Margolis:

·         “Surrounding areas” are included but ill-defined. For example, NYU is required to report crime occurring in Washington Square Park, whether or not students are involved in the crimes.

·         Schools with strong victims advocacy programs often have fewer reported sexual assaults, because schools are only required to report arrests in these crimes. Victims understandably will often rather go to a confidential supportive system to get help rather than go to the police. On the flip side, schools that do a great job supporting its female students in coming forward to report assaults will obviously have more incidents to report.

·         Very large schools (40- 50,000 students or more) often have few alcohol violations. Why? Because their campus police force is busy dealing with more serious crimes. They don’t have the time to stop and write people up for alcohol violations.

·         Schools that put an effort into building awareness about alcohol abuse and underage drinking have more reported crimes.

·         If a state allows students to have weapons, but a campus in that state doesn’t, a weapons violation is only against school policy. But just because there are no reported law violations doesn’t mean there have been no weapons incidents.

“There are many questions about what the Clery Act can and can't do. Is it making you safer? I have some serious concerns about that,” says Margolis. “The bottom line is that the Act has some holes. Thinking of it as a full and accurate report of crime on campuses is misguided. You’ve got to understand what you’re looking at, and what the issues are that have surrounded this law for years.”  

If you’re looking at colleges this fall, keep in mind what the Daily Beast says before they scare you into reading their rankings. Parents are asking, “will my child be safe on campus? Almost universally, that answer is yes. Statistics for campus crime—80 percent of which involve students both as perpetrator and victim—generally pale when compared to the general population.” That’s the real story.