A recent Harvard Business School working paper estimates the impact of campus scandals. Here is the abstract:
Does it make a difference if the scandal turns out to be something like Duke Lacrosse - which reflected negatively on the school at the beginning, but then the story changed and the Duke students were exonerated?
If one cares about USNWR rankings (I do not), it would seem to matter a lot more if the school was falling 10 spots from number 11 to number 21 than from 110 to 120. I doubt a school like Duke would drop 10 spots for the same scandal as say Oklahoma State. The top schools (be they top in academics or sports) will always have a line waiting to get in.
Look at Penn State - they have gotten record numbers of applicants in recent years even after their huge scandal
It would seem that some of these scandals are reflective of how the university / administration handles things (eg Penn State / Sandusky cover up) and others are reflective of a few bad seeds but the university acts appropriately (eg a hazing that results in injury or death - but the university was not aware, the fraternity broke clearly stated rules and the university acted appropriately to suspend or expel the fraternity). The terms really need to be defined here to make it meaningful. Is it just any negative media coverage?
Just read the article. You’d think they could have actually listed the scandals in the appendix. And I have to laugh at the pie charts with the headings at the bottom instead of embedded in the pie as is the standard practice in the real world. Oh, academia. It’s 2016.
Dartmouth suffered a 14% decrease in applications after the frat house problems emerged.
Here is an article about Dartmouth frats that I think popped the lid on what was happening there–
http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/news/confessions-of-an-ivy-league-frat-boy-inside-dartmouths-hazing-abuses-20120328
The problem seems somewhat thorny and entrenched–
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/13/dartmouth-alpha-delta_n_7058078.html
If you want more, just google Dartmouth and hazing and several more articles come up about separate events in different sororities and frats.