Pick up to five colleges. For each you’ll see reports of rape, fondling, dating violence and stalking per 1,000 students living on campus (2022–2024 average, from each school’s federal Clery filings), how that compares with similar schools, and ten years of history.
These are reports, not a count of what happened. A school where students trust the process can show more reports than one where they stay quiet, so a low number is not automatically good news, and we never call a school safe or unsafe. How far reports fall short ↓
Reports are not incidents. In the 2019 AAU Campus Climate Survey of more than 108,000 undergraduates, 25.9% of women and 6.8% of men said they experienced nonconsensual sexual contact while enrolled; across all students surveyed it was 13%. Spread over a student’s years in college, that’s roughly 30 to 50 of every 1,000 students each year, depending on how many years they had been enrolled.
Across the 404 colleges we compare, the median is 2.7 reports of rape or fondling per 1,000 students on campus a year, and most fall between 1.6 and 4.4: roughly one report for every 10 to 20 students who experience it. The figures above also count dating violence and stalking; this comparison counts only rape and fondling, the offenses the survey asks about.
So a school’s numbers say as much about its culture of reporting, and how it handles reports, as about its safety. What the data can show is change: when reports jump or drop, ask the school’s Title IX office why. Where a school’s own records explain an unusual year, we link the source in its 10 years of reported data.
Survey: Report on the AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct (2019). Reports: U.S. Department of Education, Clery Act data, 2022–2024.