this was a huge negative for me!! i’m going to uofsc and my biggest negative was how unsafe it can be, esp. compared to other schools in SC like clemson.
Last week in my neighborhood (not wealthy, on the edge of Denver where the ‘wealthy’ neighborhoods are half mile south out of the city or 4 miles north into the city), a woman was clearing the snow off her car and someone came up and stuck a gun in her face and stole her car and purse, etc…, in the car. Her ‘driveway’? Yes, if you call the parking lot at her apt bldg her driveway. The biggest car thefts here are 2013-2018 Kias as they have some issue with the lock/ignition system making them easy to steal.
The crime is skyrocketing here because they don’t prosecute. People with 5 prior/pending cases are released without bail and they just steal another car. Most thefts are found abandoned a few days later after they’ve been used for other crimes and often are totaled because of the meth in the cars.
I’m not worried about my car being stolen as it is a 5-speed and no one knows how to drive it.
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My son’s 5-speed got stolen in LA 
My spouse drives a 5 speed with a balky transmission. I don’t know if someone could even get it out of our driveway (steep hill) let alone up the street! It takes a lot of love and sweet-talking to get it moving…
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Clemson is kind of in the middle of nowhere, compared to UofSC, which is in the middle of the large capital city of Columbia. I don’t think Clemson has the same type of crime issues as UofSC.
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My daughter goes to Clemson and loves it, but went to a football game at usc and loved it, we are from a suburban/urban area and she felt like she would’ve loved going to school there (didn’t apply, Clemson was an out of the blue last minute application, usc would’ve been cheaper too). She graduated HS in 2021 so missed a lot of college tours.
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We’re in NC, near the border of SC and know many students at both Clemson & UofSC and have never heard a negative thing about either (except when a student at one is trash-talking the other #rivals 
)
I read the other day that Mark Wahlberg’s daughter goes to Clemson. I thought that was random considering most celebrity kids are at NYU, USC or Michigan.
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I read that too! Clemson was a good choice for our daughter, it’s good to have different experiences and meet different types of people. The football trash talk cracks me up, the memes would not be thought PC for our northeast colleges.
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We went on a campus tour at U of Arizona last fall. while on the tour, a mom from San Diego asked about campus crime and “all of the gun violence.” What she was REALLY asking about was a fairly recent (it had happened just a few weeks’ prior) crime on campus in which a former U of A grad student came on campus with a gun and murdered his former professor/advisor. That particular was a targeted crime, not random gun violence. The grad student was kicked out of the program for repeatedly threatening people with violence.
Looking at U of A’s 2022 crime report (https://uapd.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/2022%20Main%20Campus%20ASR%20FINAL%20Sept%2028%201140.pdf), it reports data up to 2021, so last year’s shooting of the professor I mentioned is not included in that.
However, MOST of the arrests were due to drugs and alcohol. Other statistics:
- arson - 3 cases
- 19 motor vehicle thefts - but southern AZ, being close to Mexico, does have more car thefts overall than in other areas…this is not a UofA thing…it’s a Tucson thing.
- 22 burglaries
- 11 aggravated assaults
- 18 rape cases
- 11 fondling cases
that’s for ~44,000 total students (grad+undergrad).
On the U of A tour, one of the other parents said to San Diego mom something to the effect of “Oh please, the crime here is nothing. Have you tried walking around San Diego lately without getting accosted? You need to get out of your suburb more.” 
I think that regardless of which school one’s kid goes to, your kid needs to practice situational awareness. Do all of the things that people above have talked about…don’t hold dorm exterior doors open for people you don’t know. Use the late night campus security walk-you-home service. Don’t walk around late at night by yourself. Don’t have your earbuds in noise cancelling mode on. Stop walking around all the time with your nose in your phone…pay attention to your surroundings.
And if your student is female, maybe take them to a self defense class. Our local police department offers them. I’m gonna sign up my DDs for it before they head off to college.
A class in self defense is great— but statistically, your D is more likely to be assaulted by someone she knows (not a stranger approaching her on the street) when she is less able to defend herself (inebriated, date rape drug, etc.)
THOSE are the self defense tactics we need to be teaching young people.
And also- never get behind the wheel of a car with someone who has been drinking. Even if they claim “I’m just a little buzzed”.
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You don’t believe that someone was mugged at USC? Or four times? I might also be skeptical about 4x, although there are areas of the country were it can certainly happen if you continue to frequent them. But once or twice? 20 years ago? Yeah, that’s quite believable in my opinion. Whether or not it happened to you, or whether or not someone you know told you it happened to them doesn’t really matter. I haven’t been in quite some time and I’ve heard the area has improved a great deal. But 20 or so years ago around SC? Yeah, I believe that.
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Once, maybe twice, I can believe. Anything beyond that is exaggeration to make the story more shocking.
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We are in the middle of the college search, with ODD being in 11th grade. For grins, I went to each of 5 colleges’ websites (for different schools we’ve been considering) and looked up their Clery report statistics for calendar year 2019 (since that year was still ‘everything in person’). Here’s what I found:
| UNM | UofA | NMSU | Southwestern Univ | ASU Tempe campus | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total student population | 25,400 | 44,831 | 25,312 | 1511 | 54,866 |
| Rape | 23 | 37 | 7 | 5 | 23 |
| domestic violence | 12 | 22 | 16 | 0 | 3 |
| dating violence | 30 | 3 | 0 | 13 | |
| stalking | 45 | 4 | 12 | 2 | 13 |
| aggravated assault | 21 | 6 | 2 | 0 | 5 |
| burglary | 50 | 47 | 25 | 3 | 20 |
| motor vehicle theft | 76 | 4 | 7 | 0 | 10 |
| disciplinary referrals for liquor law violation | 199 | 748 | 95 | 61 | 921 |
| disciplinary referrals for drug law violations | 92 | 103 | 13 | 24 | 140 |
| fondling | 14 | 9 | 8 | 0 | 15 |
| robbery | 2 | 3 | 0 | 0 | 3 |
So to 1 of the OP’s orig. questions: “Have you eliminated any schools” because of campus crime? No. Not yet.
My 2 cents:
I think it’s important to consider the total student population when looking that the statistics. I also don’t consider the liquor law and drug law violations’ referrals statistics to be too much to get worked up about. But if you ARE worried about that, then look at ASU’s #s for that and holy cow, that’s a lot.
However, if you look at all of the other statistics for the above schools, there does seem to be interesting data. UNM, for example, gives me a little bit of pause…their “non-drug & non-booze” crimes total up to ~273, compared to 135 for UofA. NMSU = 77. ASU = 105.
My kid has a MUCH higher chance of getting a car stolen in Albuquerque compared to in Tucson, according to just the 2019 data alone. in fact, according to Facts + Statistics: Auto theft | III, Albuquerque is #4 in the nation for car thefts. That’s interesting, in my opinion, because Las Cruces (where NMSU is) is a stone’s throw from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, so you’d think that the proximity to the border would = higher car theft.
The SF Bay Area (SF-Oakland-Berkeley) is #6 for car thefts and just the car break-ins problem in SF alone is enough to give me pause to not even VISIT SF…and ABQ’s car theft problem is higher, so there’s that to consider.
The other higher #s at UNM for all of the other crimes does make me think, “Hm, maybe the other schools are looking better.” However, we haven’t gone on tours of UNM or NMSU yet, so haven’t gotten the vibe yet.
By comparison, look at the data for Dartmouth for 2019:
(apparently dating violence is now considered part of domestic violence stats)
| Dartmouth | |
|---|---|
| Total student population | 6,350 |
| Rape | 32 |
| domestic violence | 13 |
| dating violence | |
| stalking | 9 |
| aggravated assault | 2 |
| burglary | 14 |
| motor vehicle theft | 2 |
| disciplinary referrals for liquor law violation | 238 |
| disciplinary referrals for drug law violations | 5 |
| fondling | 13 |
| robbery | 1 |
So does that data sort of back up the general online gossip/vibe that Dartmouth is known for having a heavy drinking/frat boy/bro/rape culture on campus? If you look at the # of rapes divided by total student population and compare that to the bigger schools I listed in the other post, I think the answer is yes. Is your car going to get stolen at Dartmouth? My crystal ball says no.
Dartmouth has 1/4 the student population of UNM, but has more disciplinary referrals for liquor law violations than UNM does. My ODD is not into the Greek life thing and isn’t into ‘bro’ culture at all, so that plus the fact that we can’t afford Dartmouth AND she wouldn’t get admitted anyway means that THAT school is a no go for us.
But I was just using that as an example.
Every family has to decide what they think is the best decision for them. And what works for 1 kid might not be the best answer for another kid. Your mileage may vary. 
I think this is a great topic to bring discuss, btw…thanks to the OP for bringing it up!
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Those reports are only as good as the data. I saw a Clery report for a popular university after an attack/assault in a dorm hall landed two kids in the hospital with concussions. The school reported it as ‘harassment’.
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Well, at the moment, that’s all I have to go on…federally-mandated reports and statistics. If anybody has other ideas, I’m open to them.
Visit, and have your student go with their gut.
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@sbinaz
Numbers only tell part of a story.
If you just look at the numbers for Dartmouth, it seems shocking compared to the others.
But are you accounting for the numbers of students actually living ON campus at all the other colleges? Are you accounting for the school culture itself, where perhaps admin more openly encourage students to report crimes and don’t try to sweep things under the rug? Does the college make it easy for students to report campus crime? What about the types of student themselves? Is it possible that the types of students Dartmouth attracts might be the types of students who strongly advocate for themselves, and who are less willing to be silenced? Is it a combination of all these things? Is it possible that at some of those colleges, there are people who simply would not want to report crimes for fear of retaliation, or who simply never report them because they don’t know where to start?
So you can see, numbers alone don’t tell a whole story.
P.S. What is ODD. Other dear daughter?
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Using these data for comparisons of relative safety are tricky because so much of the reporting and categorization is up to the school. A school prioritizing and focusing on campus safety and making a concerted effort to be transparent and accurate in its reporting can look much less safe than a counterpart more concerned with the impact the appearance of an unsafe environment may have, sweeping issues under the rug and downplaying incidents.
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ODD = older dear daughter