<p>According to Business Insider, Duke ranks #4 in dangerous campuses ahead of, among others, NC A&T, Rutgers-Newark, and South Alabama. Any idea as to the validity of this? </p>
<p>Most</a> Dangerous Colleges In America - Business Insider</p>
<p>The question in my mind from reading that article is exactly what they were trying to convey. Were they trying to say that a particular campus is more dangerous because it’s a college campus and therefore would have a high concentration of potential targets? Or were they trying to convey that these campus are located in dangerous areas? Or a combination? The way that they analyzed their data (weighting violent crimes 4:1 relative to property crimes and calculating per capita crime rate) is a pretty raw method that gives little insight into the underlying cause and thus I feel that this ranking has little utility. </p>
<p>It would have been more illuminating, for example, if they also gathered the same data for surrounding areas or cities that the campuses were located in and then normalized it to the crime rate they calculated for campuses. That would have told you roughly how effective the university police forces were at protecting the student body and may even shed light on whether the mere presence of a college campus in that area is a catalyst for increased crime. </p>
<p>Another thing to consider is the total population of the campus. I assume that the data is reported by the university police department whose jurisdiction is mostly on campus. Therefore we are talking on campus crime here. However the campus population fluctuates wildly during the course of a day because of employees and grad students most of whom do not live on campus. There are better ways to count those people besides their method of total enrollment which ignores employees completely. </p>
<p>In short this is interesting but not terribly informative.</p>
<p>Please ignore this article and ultimately this thread.</p>