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Crime
Campus Crime 2015: Top 10 Highest Reported Crime Rates for Mid-Sized Colleges
Student safety is a high priority for all colleges and universities. While colleges and universities are typically safer than the areas that surround them, many schools face important and unique challenges. Law Street's Campus Crime Rankings were created to serve as a comprehensive look at the safety of our college campuses, and to act as a resource for students, families, and college communities.
Federal law requires all postsecondary institutions that receive federal financial aid to report and monitor criminal offenses on their campuses. Each year this self-reported data is published by the Department of Education to help colleges and their communities understand the safety challenges that they face. Law Street Campus Crime Rankings utilize the most recent three years of this data to determine the average violent crime rate per 1,000 students for each school with available statistics.
Our rankings break up schools into different categories to ensure that the comparisons are as helpful and fair as possible. This list ranks mid-sized schools, which include four-year institutions with enrollments between 10,000 to 20,000 students.
Click here to see the data used to create these rankings.
Check out the Top 10 Highest Crime Rates on Mid-Sized Campuses below:
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Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Forcible sex offenses make up the vast majority of reported violent crimes at MIT, with 37 incidents occurring between 2011 and 2013. The relatively high number of reported sexual assaults is likely related to the school’s policies, which encourage sexual assault reporting. MIT is one of only a few schools that conducts campus sexual assault surveys to determine how students feel about sexual assault on campus. The most recent survey found that 17 percent of women and five percent of men reported being sexually assaulted.
MIT has taken steps to reduce sexual assault on campus and has an entire website dedicated to providing students with information about it, including policies, reporting options, and discussion of the school’s efforts to increase awareness and reduce misconduct. These efforts include an online training program for incoming freshmen about preventing sexual assault, and the creation of a committee that reviews the school’s sexual assault policies and suggests changes. MIT offers campus safety and security services such as 24-hour foot and vehicle patrol, 24-hour emergency phones, and controlled dormitory access. The MIT Police Department is divided into four divisions, including Patrol and Special Services. Special Services engages in crime prevention in the form of education and investigates crimes on campus. The school also has a Crime Club that allows students to implement public safety projects.
The one murder, which occurred in 2013, was the death of MIT police officer Sean Collier at the hands of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 11,301 (4,528 undergraduates)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 1.27 per 1,000 students*
Murder: 1
Forcible Sex Offense: 37
Robbery: 3
Aggravated Assault: 2
Campus Setting: City (Midsize)
*MIT’s average violent crime rate was rounded from 1.268 to 1.27
-Campus crime statistics are three year totals from 2011, 2012, and 2013
-The average violent crime rate is an average of the three-year data shown as a rate per 1,000 students
Click here to see the methodology used for the rankings.
Research and analysis done by Law Street’s Crime in America team:
Kevin Rizzo, Kwame Apea, Jennie Burger, Alissa Gutierrez, and Maurin Mwombela.
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