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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:
Image courtesy of Mirsasha via Flickr
Vanderbilt is a private, research university located in Nashville, Tennessee. Vanderbilt reported 43 forcible sex offenses between 2011 to 2013, making up the majority of the school’s reported violent crimes. In November 2013, a group of six current and former students filed a complaint with the Department of Education against the university. The complaint cited personal accounts from several rape victims and it claimed that the school created a hostile environment for victims and the entire student body. The complaint also played a large role in the Department of Education’s decision to investigate the school for possible Title IX violations, which was announced several months later.
After the complaint, Vanderbilt increased the training offered to its faculty and in September 2014 opened the Project Safe Center, which promotes awareness and provides services to victims. Vanderbilt also offers programs such as an online training course called VU Personal Empowerment Through Self Awareness (PETSA), Vanderbilt Visions, and the Green Dot bystander intervention program. Vanderbilt offers immediate assistance programs for students who have been victims of sexual assault. The Vanderbilt Police Department works closely with the Metro Police Department to provide assistance and resources for victims and witnesses.
Elizabeth Latt, Vanderbilt’s Assistant Vice Chancellor for News and Communications, addressed the school’s crime statistics in a statement to Law Street:
Our numbers reflect a campus culture in which we proactively pursue crime and regularly encourage our community to report crimes on campus. As a university, we have worked to not only to adhere to the letter, but also to the spirit of the Clery Act. The result has sometimes been that our Clery numbers are higher, which we believe reflects more vigorous reporting and follow up by our campus police department, rather than a higher incidence of crime.
Fall 2013 Enrollment: 12,757 (6,835 undergraduate)
Average Violent Crime Rate: 2.06 per 1,000 students
Murder: 0
Forcible Sex Offense: 43
Robbery: 14
Aggravated Assault: 22
Campus Setting: City (Large)
-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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