Why not have your DD post on each of the college sites, about how safe the students feel?
Like goat girl, my son’s school sends out alerts whenever there is a shooting or an outage. His UG had safety buttons to push if one wanted a ride. The main safety factor is to emphasize not leaving the campus at night by themselves.
You can narrow the list right down to nothing if you start with 10 school that offer her program and then kick off the ones that are too cold or too hot or too far or too close or don’t have dorms with singles. Yale is in an unsafe, run down town, yet they line up in droves to attend. USC has a lot of crime, but again, applications galore. The financial is a whole other factor and MUST be considered.
Best case scenario - she gets accepted everywhere, gets lots of money everywhere, and can THEN eliminate schools because they aren’t in nice areas or don’t have the right kind of lap pool or require 16 layers of long johns to take a stroll in late January.
Ask yourself (and her) this question: if this school is the only acceptance I get, would I rather go there or not go to school? If there is no how, no way she’d go to the school, save the application fee. Otherwise, apply.
And you need to differentiate between student initiated crime (vandalism of a frat house, which if the building isn’t owned by the college is going to show up as a community crime) vs. someone being attacked walking home from the library.
My kids attended urban colleges; did the “dorky” things like call campus police for an escort when walking home from a late shift in a lab or from work; took the free van late at night, etc. Urban colleges have all these things- and in general, campus police and security have to beg kids to take advantage of them. The “blue light” emergency system is fast and efficient- and yet most campus rapes (according to the statistics) take place in a dorm room where one student is the victim of a crime perpetrated by another student. Girls aren’t picking up the “blue light phone” when they get raped at a party although maybe they should be- especially if the party is still going on.
I would have been more worried about them attending rural or suburban colleges where the kids regularly drive home from bars and parties and do otherwise risky things that have nothing to do with crime and a “bad neighborhood”. In an urban environment, kids take public transportation or walk with escorts late at night. And since it’s too expensive to park and own a car- few kids do.
But also be aware of subconscious bias. There are neighborhoods in NYC for example which are very, very safe. They are likely to have more diversity than someone who comes from a town in Vermont is used to seeing. But a middle class, safe neighborhood with Hispanic and African American and Asian families living in it is going to be just as safe as its white counterpart somewhere else. The teachers and nurses and pharmacists and social workers and artists who live in those neighborhoods staff “watch patrols” and work hard to maintain safe streets and vandalism-free parks for their kids. Just like you do.
Some of the suburban and rural colleges offer lots of entertainment during weekends. Personally, I think this is safer than going into cities. Nonetheless, my son chose a city.
Another factor to consider if students usually live on campus all 4 years, or if apartments are in close proximity to campus.