suicide rates among US colleges

<p>though there's plenty of bridges, there's also plenty of places that there aren't bridges or fences for that matter. You could be just walking through the woods and "oops, no ground for 200 more feet below." I think this is how the one kid died last year, it was in the middle of the night so it'd be rather easy to miss something like this if you're wasted.</p>

<p>i would love for cornell to be able to get rid of its suicide stigma. i'm going there later this year.</p>

<p>is there a link showing suicide stats in different colleges?</p>

<p>I've been told by some that I had a minor stroke while at Mount Union. While it's not suicide it's something to keep note of.</p>

<p>i thought nyu's suicides were due to those students being on drugs and not in control of themselves... not a lack of unity..</p>

<p>I used to go to Seton Hall in New Jersey and had a professor who taught at NYU. SHE said the reason that the school thinks there are so many suicides is because of the campus and how the buildings are not close to eachother and how they separate the students and there is no sense of comfort in a big and large and busy environment. She said the school is trying to incorporate more programs to bring students to be more involved in the school. They had to put up gates around the library where most of the suicides occured.</p>

<p>ok I can't post something and be the last person posting!</p>

<p>Has Rice ever had an issue with suicides? I have a teacher who seems to think so, and she was actually reluctant to send in a rec for me for Rice for that reason.</p>

<p>Can't find anything online. Perhaps it does, but I can't imagine significantly more so than any other school.</p>

<p>tell your teacher she shouldn't be picking what schools you should apply to</p>

<p>MIT definately has the highest...too much stress. MIT also has the highest rate of students with STDS according to my gym teacher. Hahaha.</p>

<p>For the last time, no, MIT does not have a high suicide rate. Don't know about the STDs, but I personally haven't run into any problems.</p>

<p>Two weeks ago, a freshman died from a 4-story parking structure here in ucsd....his facebook profile is still online</p>

<p>Actually molliebatmit, MIT does have the highest suicide rate. Just because you haven't run into problems, doesn't mean that there are none. There are many stories of students commiting suicide at MIT. Do a search on google for them.</p>

<p>You must have missed all of the jumpers at NYU in the last two years.</p>

<p><a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/07/national/main641542.shtml%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/09/07/national/main641542.shtml&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.thevillager.com/villager_46/nyucopeswith.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.thevillager.com/villager_46/nyucopeswith.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p><a href="http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/294801p-252330c.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.nydailynews.com/front/story/294801p-252330c.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>so what does that mean, is nyu in the lead now or something. The articles didn't say that they are in the lead.</p>

<p>and your stats to support MIT being the number one? Did I miss that?</p>

<p>Well i've read before that it was and heard lots of stories about it. I don't feel like researching it now. Just check it out on google. I might be wrong now, but last time i checked, MIT was number one in suicides. Cornell and Carnegie Mellon were high on the list.</p>

<p>Here are some quotes from the February, 2001 Boston Globe article on college suicides, the only such study I have seen. It was mostly about MIT.</p>

<p>"Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been far more likely to kill themselves over the past decade compared to those at 11 other universities with elite science and engineering programs - 38 percent more often than the next school, Harvard, and four times more than campuses with the lowest rate - a Globe study has found."</p>

<p>"MIT's rate stands at 20.6 undergraduate deaths per 100,000 students since 1990. For the comparable age group in the United States, 17- to 22-year-olds, the rate is 13.5 per 100,000. At all colleges, experts estimate, about 7 undergraduates per 100,000 kill themselves. Calculations based on 100,000 are used by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other experts to compare deaths among populations."</p>

<p>"The rate at Harvard, with total annual enrollment of about 18,500, was 7.4, with 15 suicides since 1990. The rate at Johns Hopkins was 7, and at Cornell, 5.7. At some public universities that compete for students with MIT, incident rates were also lower: The University of Michigan, which enrolls about 37,000 students a year, had a rate of 2.5."</p>

<p>The full Boston Globe article can be purchased from Boston.com.</p>

<p>The student newspaper at MIT published an article in February, 2000, which provides a snippet of information about Cornell:</p>

<p>"Cornell University is one peer institution that does maintain moderately complete records of their student deaths in response to a common perception that they have a high suicide rate. Cornell had eight students take their own lives in the past ten years. With about 19,000 students on campus, Cornell has a suicide rate of about 4.3 per 100,000 student years for that time period, far below both MIT and national rates."</p>

<p>The full MIT article is located here:
<a href="http://www-tech.mit.edu/V120/N6/comp6.6n.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www-tech.mit.edu/V120/N6/comp6.6n.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>My summary: The national college undergraduate suicide rate is 7 per 100,000, which is actually much lower (about half) than the rate for all people of college age. Cornell's rate, likely taken from 1990-2000, is around 4.3 to 5.7. MIT's rate is much higher, but there is no full national study of all universities to show which school has the highest. In fact, both of the above articles state that several schools refuse to provide suicide data or do not keep track, including Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie Mellon, and Yale. </p>

<p>This is the latest data I could find on school suicides. Draw your own conclusions.</p>

<p>But the problem with those numbers is that MIT is a small school, and although there was a rash of suicides in the late 90s, there weren't enough, given MIT's small size, to say that MIT's average is actually above the national average.</p>

<p>This is especially true because MIT's student population at that time was strongly male (males are more likely to commit suicide than females) and strongly engineering or business majors (engineering and business majors are more likely to commit suicide than students in other majors).</p>

<p>It is dishonest to wave numbers around without the proper statistical analysis to back them up -- sure, the national rate is 7/100,000, but what's the standard error of the mean for that? MIT's student population (and the student population at MIT that committed suicide in the late 90s) is too small to draw any conclusions -- one statistical treatment I've seen concluded that it will not be possible to know whether or not MIT's average is above the national average for another thirty years. Just because 10 (or whatever) > 7 doesn't mean MIT's rate > national average.</p>

<p>Don't tell me "there's not a suicide problem because you haven't seen it". I'm not interested in anecdotal finger-pointing; I'm interested in a rigorous statistical treatment of the data.</p>