<p>You do realize New Haven, the area of NYC Columbia's in, and the south side of Chicago are terrible areas, correct? Just when I visited UChicago an alum came up to me and told me about how someone got stabbed the last week. Are you people ignorant to this?</p>
<p>Every city has rough neighborhoods. The bad parts of Evanston [Northwestern] are some of the worst.</p>
<p>Evanston seemed nice when I visited, although I do know there’s crime (probably because it’s so close to a big city). UChicago is like across the street from the ghetto.</p>
<p>Oh noes, my life would be in danger every hour of the day… oh wait. There are worse things in this world than living close to a poor area of the city.</p>
<p>Not necessarily poor; DANGEROUS.</p>
<p>So, I would take a bullet if they let me in Yale. It’s Yale, it’s just the prestige of all these schools that attracts their applicants not the area. Its the education you receive. Besides these campuses have everything on them, you don’t need to leave them, its like their own towns.</p>
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<p>Boy, do you sound suburban.</p>
<p>I live in a dangerous neighborhood as it is. Dangerous on paper, at least; personally, I’ve never been shot at or knifed here. Other than the high crime rate, it’s nice.</p>
<p>Believe me, it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll get caught up in a gang-related gunfight the moment you set foot in New Haven.</p>
<p>All these places are so dangerous. After all, you can’t trust poor people or minorities to keep to themselves; they smell your money from the fifth floor of your dorm and set up an ambush on the next block. Carry your rape whistle + pepper spray prominently.</p>
<p>Yup, and someone got shot in the basement of one of Harvard’s dorms, so you will likely get shot if you go there. At Berkeley, you’ll probably be mugged, and in broad daylight. In fact, you’ll probably experience injury and likely death at any urban university. Don’t stop there though - at Stanford you’ll probably be crushed in a building when an earthquake hits. And at Dartmouth you’ll probably die of boredom.</p>
<p>Life has risks. You take them because they’re worth it.</p>
<p>You’re at more risk of dying just driving across any city.</p>
<p>It’s a matter of taking care of yourself as well as you can. For example, you don’t go jogging around Morningside with your iPod or iPhone, or mill around Morningside Park at night. New Haven also has its spots to avoid; from staying and taking classes there over the summer a few years back, it became evident how one direction could feel incredibly more safe than if you happened to walk the other direction. One block to the next could be a complete shift.</p>
<p>It’s all a matter of staying with people, knowing your surroundings, not being out too late, not being lured into a false sense of security, and not doing dumb stuff.</p>
<p>The opportunities afforded by these schools are really hard to match in other “safer” places. Big picture.</p>
<p>I lived in a very nice neighborhood for about a year that was just a short drive away from U Chicago. That city is insanely diverse, as I am sure NYC is as well. I was never shot. I also never went into a poor neighborhood alone at night. Now I live in a small rural southern town, and I still would not do that in any one of the poor neighborhoods nearby, where a lot of bad stuff happens. Look around you, there are risks anywhere you live. That said, Chicago is one of the friendliest, nicest cities I have ever been to, and the campus is quite nice(not to mention the world class education…which is what most people go for I would hope). I am sure many people in other cities will have similar things to say about their respective locations.</p>
<p>If you not stupid you won’t get shot. Hopefully.</p>
<p>I agree with Tenors. Don’t act like a moron (i.e. stumbling around drunk at 3:00am, counting your money on the streets, things like that) and you’ll most likely be fine.</p>
<p>Morningside Heights is one of the lowest crime neighborhoods in Manhattan. It’s very residential and quite wealthy in fact. I live in a cute, upper-middle class suburban area that happens to be home to University of Delaware. The crime rate there is SUBSTANTIALLY higher than that of Columbia.</p>
<p>Twenty years ago, DW and I lived in an apartment in Chicago, literally right across the street from what was then Cabrini Green, one of the poster children for crime-ridden inner city Chicago (now gone and replaced by upscale condos). We bought a small farm in southwestern Wisconsin as an investment and weekend getaway. Our Wisconsin neighbors thought we were nuts to live in that crime-ridden city.</p>
<p>The upshot: the six years we owned the farm, we were burglarized four times (house three times, barn once), to the point where we had to install a burglar alarm system. In the same period, we had one incident where our car was broken into in Chicago. I used to run in the Chicago neighborhood at all hours of the day and night and was never harmed or felt myself in danger.</p>
<p>Yes, there’s crime in Chicago. However, it’s overwhelmingly poor minority people victimizing other poor minority people. In the rare situations where a white middle-class person is the victim of a poor minority person, it becomes a huge story, partly because of institutionalized racism in the local media but also partly because it IS rare.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t take the risk. I’m not that obsessed with prestige and prestige alone.</p>
<p>One of the best academic values in the nation, Temple U, is smack in the middle of the hellhole that is North Philadelphia. So it doesn’t have to be about the prestige. I went to Penn which I think was marginally safer. True store: a friend of mine there had skin taken off of his nose by a city bus as it rounded the corner he was standing at. For me becoming a little more street-smart was just one more part of the college experience.</p>
<p>Sometimes, for a girl, being “street smart” isn’t enough</p>
<p>lol you’re such a ■■■■■</p>