>>>>Following the Yale murder and The Daily Beast’s ranking of the most crime-ridden campuses, we crunch the numbers again—this time to determine America’s safest schools.
In the aftermath of the murder of Yale doctoral student Annie Le, The Daily Beast conducted the exercise of attempting to discern how colleges stack up against each other safety-wise, and then highlighted the 25 schools—out of 4,000 measured—that performed the worst, based on statistics they provided the federal government plus our own methodology. Our rankings last week attracted a lot of attention, and in doing so led us to this natural follow-up: Rather than just focus on campuses where crime is an issue, why not also try to determine which schools are the safest?
Hence, the list we have assembled here, the 25 safest colleges in America. Unlike the Top 25 in football or basketball, this contest was open to any and all schools with a few caveats. First, we increased our minimum enrollment threshold for consideration to 6,000 students, because there are thousands of very small colleges that don’t have the same set of issues as larger schools (that a 275-student bible college has less crime per capita than a major state university yields no discernable lessons). Second, we knocked out graduate-only and two-year schools, again searching for more apples-to-apples comparisons. And finally, we excluded commuter colleges. It turns out that many of the safest schools in America are urban universities, but our methodology holds that it’s hard to compare schools that host students a few hours a day, versus those responsible around-the-clock. So our rule was firm: If you have dorms for at least some of your students, you’re in; if not, you’re out.
We then looked at the numbers. Specifically, for the past two decades, most colleges and universities nationwide have been required under the federal Clery Act—named for a Lehigh University freshman raped and murder in her dorm before her parents discovered there’d been a slew of violent incidents at the university—to report annually to the U.S. Department of Education about crimes on and near campus, including murder, assault, sexual offenses and robberies.>>>>
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-24/the-top-25-safest-colleges/