<p>Todays Education section of the New York Times has Harvard gaining the dubious distinction of the second highest rates of Forcible Sex and Burglary amongst large urban campus's in the US. In 2006 at Harvard there were 18 reported sexual assaults and 315 Burglaries.
This is despite the fact that their stated enrollment size of 25,700 (among all Harvard campuses... and you thought it was a small school!) is much smaller than many other campus's included in the table including NYU, Ohio State, University of Texas etc....</p>
<p>Apparently Harvard reports "larcenies" with its burglary figures, which it is not technically required to do, and Harvard is unique among colleges in that it has thousands of tourists on its campus everyday, which contributes to the crime rate.</p>
<p>BTW, wonderingmum, Princeton's burglary rate is higher than 44 colleges on that list, and Princeton is less than half the size of the smallest university listed.</p>
<p>Below is a comparison of large city campuses. Of course it is a bit dated and does not completely adjust for all of the factors involved. Obviously if a campus is in a city center district, like Harvard or Yale, there are more tourists, visitors, office workers, shoppers, transit users and other non-students in the area at all times and that will affect the crime "rate" -i.e., perhaps dividing by the student population is not the best metric.<br> STALCOMMPOL:</a> Crime Data and Methods of Analysis</p>
<p>Also, keep in mind that "safety" also encompasses driving - since students are about 200 times more likely to die in an automobile accident than in random crime. So presumably attending an urban campus where you are less likely to get in a vehicle is actually much safer than attending a suburban or rural one. Statistics bear this out, if you look at the annual number of traffic fatalities, mostly among student populations at "commuter schools" or other institutions where students often get in a car (thousands of deaths per year), versus the number occurring due to random crime (about a half dozen deaths per year across the entire country, Virginia Tech massacre notwithstanding, at both urban and rural schools).</p>
<p>Additionally, I would also like to point out that Harvard has been very good about being extremely proactive in terms of making it easy to report sexual assault, which could lead to us having slightly higher numbers (ie, students actually feel comfortable reporting it b/c there is a culture of it being dealt with discretely and effectively). There are more ways to get in touch with someone if assault happens than I can count, many of which are student-only run and anonymous. Harvard still includes the numbers from student-run groups in their report (Room 9, for example). Including anonymous reports to telephone hotlines, however, could also be resulting in slightly inflated numbers.</p>