<p>I have been a member of CC for 3+ years now. What will NEVER EVER cease to amaze me is this...</p>
<p>Why do parents send their kids to college towns/cities where they are afraid for their children's safety?? After sending their kids, they then come here to ask for advice about how to keep their offspring safe. It's very annoying. It's tantamount to placing your child in a car with a known alcoholic/drinker/driver and then worrying that they will get into an accident. Why should the kid be placed in the situation in the first place??</p>
<p>DD was interested in schools that I felt would not be good for her for various reasons(safety & lack of racial tolerance were a few reasons). I discouraged her apps to those schools. She did a weekend visit at an Ivy League school in January. Her wallet was stolen from the dining hall and to add insult to injury, the administration did an abysmal job of handling it post incident. </p>
<p>The whole situation left a very bad taste in our mouths and the school came off of her list. Why send your child to a school in which you have misgivings about? Even in the slightest way? </p>
<p>Please don't flame me! Maybe it's not my place to ask...</p>
<p>I agree with you wholeheartedly NewhavenCTMom. But I never understood the fears anyway. Stuff gets stolen, girls are assaulted by drunken peers, students carry guns and start shooting, etc. everywhere. How do you determine what is safe? New York City schools, by definition, are probably less safe than a lot of schools out in cow pastures, but unless your kid is wandering the streets alone, they will most likely be okay. Most college incidents happen on campus and in dorm rooms. And they happen to students who are drunk and not in control of or aware of their surroundings.</p>
<p>As you know, I too have a freshman D at Yale. I “worry” more about what could happen to her on campus than the streets of New Haven.</p>
<p>I’m always amazed at what other parents consider unsafe. I guess if you spent your entire life in white bread suburbs everything feels unsafe. I let my kid go to Jordan for a year. We worried. It was the adventure of a lifetime for him and enabled him to improve his Arabic exponentially. He went from C’s to A’s in Arabic, the internship he had there led him directly to current internship. </p>
<p>The administration or the police? However, it is true that most thefts are not resolved by the arrest of a suspect, since there are just too many of them, and there is often not enough evidence to find the thieves even if the police had time to individually investigate each one.</p>
<p>Of course, there are parents who go pretty far the opposite way, requiring their (usually female) kids to stay at home under parental supervision and curfews and commute to a local school, foregoing other schools that may be better academic fits at lower cost.</p>
<p>I think the issue you raise is a valid one, especially in today’s world. Fortunately almost all the colleges we toured for D1 were in very safe areas and we had no real concerns. There was one very selective school that we all loved but for the location. We actually flew back for a second visit to see if we could get more comfortable with it. Nope, we all agreed that D would be constantly looking over her shoulder and H and I would not sleep well at night. It ended up coming off the final list.</p>
<p>Maybe they let them go after people on CC persuade them that their concerns are overstated. I don’t know how many times the question of safety has been asked and answered about New Haven since I’ve been posting here.</p>
<p>What I’ve never understood is how anybody could think their kids would be safer at a college where many students have cars.</p>
<p>So true @mathmom. It just really burns me up! It was just an issue I’ve seen here so many times. Students and parents alike post about a particular schools lack of safety but beat down the doors to attend. Leaves me scratching my head all the time. </p>
<p>As far as your child going to Jordan, you felt the benefits would outweigh the risk involved. Did you come to CC and lament about it after his plane landed? </p>
<p>Oh no. Nor when he went and did research in Pakistan and India freshman year. (Mostly because I felt like I would jinx him if I complained!) He got a grant to go and while we gave him some money he was fully prepared to empty his bank account if we had stamped our feet. That was a great experience too. Would I be kicking myself if something had happened to him? Probably. </p>
<p>I admit though I come from a family that never played it safe - at least regarding travels.</p>
<p>So true @mathmom. It just really burns me up! It was just an issue I’ve seen here so many times. Students and parents alike post about a particular schools lack of safety but beat down the doors to attend. Leaves me scratching my head all the time. </p>
<p>As far as your child going to Jordan, you felt the benefits would outweigh the risk involved. Did you come to CC and lament about it after his plane landed? </p>
<p>@ucbalumnus-trust me, the administration’s response to DD was shocking. This had nothing to do with the police. I wasn’t expecting an arrest. Just some empathy on their part. </p>
<p>@Hunt, then what does that say about them? If you have strong feelings about any given setting & you allow someone from an internet website persuade you? It’s just perplexing.</p>
<p>The recent tragic deaths of young people in my town were the following:
1- BF is drunk, picked his GF up from an event and wrapped his car around a tree. BF survived, girl is dead.
2- Drug overdose (exacerbated by alcohol and a bunch of people at the party who thought the kid was acting “weird” but didn’t connect the drinking to the behavior until the kid was in a coma.
3- Kid texting his friend that there was traffic and that he’d be late for a party.</p>
<p>All of these took place in what should have been statistically safe places. Nobody died from being attacked by a stranger; nobody was put in harms way by an “outsider” invading a safe space.</p>
<p>I think you are in denial if you think you can keep your kids safe by avoiding “bad campuses” or bad neighborhoods. You keep your kids safer (not safe, but safer) if you teach them how to take care of themselves. And drugs, drinking, driving with someone who is intoxicated- not safe behaviors.</p>
<p>Honestly, I think when you watch the news today you have to conclude that anything can happen anywhere. You need to have your wits about you on ANY college campus and its surrounding town. Before the developments of the last few months I would have thought Charlottesville was one of the safest places in the U.S. And statistically it might be. As parents, the best we can do is undertake due diligence during the search process and listen to our instincts - know your child and their tendencies. </p>
<p>Our kids went to college on urban campuses. We live in the middle of the woods in a semi-rural area. They both needed to understand some city safety common sense…and that is what it is. Common sense. I have read posts from others whose kids were doing the same…and the parents wondered about safety issues.</p>
<p>There are a TON of colleges in major urban areas. A ton. </p>
<p>Like I said…it’s all common sense stuff. Both of my kids’ colleges actually included a seminar on student caution at orientation. </p>
<p>Also responsible schools go out of their way to keep students as safe as humanly possible. At Yale (which everyone always bashes because of New Haven for some stupid reason), there is a University Police force and over 200 security personnel on campus. The police enforce laws, but security is there to help students that are locked out, or need someone to walk them from the library late at night. Students have a mandatory security meeting at the beginning of the year where this is POUNDED into their heads. Again, like some of the others on this post, I agree that more dangerous things happen within the ivy covered walls than ever happens on the streets of New Haven. Anyone who thinks otherwise is naïve.</p>
<p>Things happen everywhere. I have walked around Detroit more times than I can count without incident but was raped in a small, “safe” town by a trusted person. </p>
<p>Like many have said, it’s about using common sense a lot of times. You are FAR more likely to be the victim of someone you know than a random stranger.</p>
<p>I remember years ago our next-door neighbor fretting about her daughter’s high school orchestra travelling to Vienna (at the time of Desert Storm) for a youth orchestra festival. Now, we lived at the time in a very borderline area between the Penn neighborhood and some pretty rough parts of West Philadelphia, the high school the daughter (and later my children) attended was in a neighborhood with quite a lot of crime (not necessarily against high school students), and the kid rode two subway lines in both directions every day, and walked half a mile or so on each end, to go to school. You couldn’t have found five mothers in Beirut who would have felt comfortable letting their daughters do what my neighbor’s daughter did every day. And on top of that, the daughter had been seriously sexually molested by an adult at a summer program for gifted teens a couple of years before. But the mom was all in a knot over Iraqi terrorists and airport security in Vienna!</p>
<p>You always overvalue the risks with which you are not familiar.</p>
<p>I went to college in New Haven. Two close friends were victims of violent crime during those years. One was murdered in her parents’ home by her ex-boyfriend, a recent graduate of our college. The other was attacked by strangers while camping in Blue Ridge Mountains National Park, raped, beaten, and left for dead. I had some stuff taken from my room once, and some people I knew got mugged, but street crime was not a major problem in anyone’s life.</p>
<p>My kid’s wallet was stolen out of her pocketbook in SoHo while she was shopping. Do I consider Soho to be unsafe, no. She should have been more careful with her wallet. If someone had pull a knife on her, that would have been a different matter. D1 turned down a school because we really didn’t feel it was safe right outside of the school. We didn’t know until we visited the school on the acceptance day. The school told us if students didn’t wander off campus at night then they should be fine. </p>
<p>I live in a city that would more or less be regarding as “unsafe” whose shining star is the D-1 private school in the center of it. For example, we had three shootings last weekend within 4 hours of each other. I drove past the crime scene next morning on the way to the grocery store - I live that close to where three people were murdered. </p>
<p>Parents are always concerned about the safety of this town and I imagine a few choose to not send their kids to my school because of it, but a majority of the crimes are gang and drug related. If you trust your child to make intelligent decisions (i.e. not being at Taco Bell at 3:30AM - where shooting took place) your child can survive four years here in this town and make it out unscathed. </p>
<p>Point of the matter is, if your kids are going to be responsible and take precautions when necessary (walking with a few friends to the car past nightfall, or utilizing campus safety escort services) it will go a long way in keeping them safe in a crime-ridden town. </p>
<p>I think people need to distinguish between “will my kid be safe” and “can my kid leave his bike unlocked?” They may have very different answers.</p>