posterX

MIT had the highest suicide rate in the country in a recent study by the Boston Globe. Over a period of a few years, there were several high profile suicides including one student who committed suicide by setting her entire dormitory on fire, and it's a pretty small school. Its suicide "rate" was off the charts. I think I recall that the two other schools with unusually high suicide rates were Duke and Harvard. At Harvard, a student murdered her roommate and then hung herself in her dorm room.

Cornell was mentioned since it did have three or four suicides over a period of some years, but the gorge-jumpings people refer to have actually mostly been non-students jumping. It is just a convenient place to choose if you want to kill yourself. But if you consider that a suicide at Cornell, it would kind of be like counting random people jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge towards the suicide rate for Columbia.

However, I'd definitely question the sample size and accuracy of that study. It's hard to say a school has a very high suicide rate based on 5 or 10 students who killed themselves, even if many other universities had no suicides, and it is even harder to make a connection between the characteristics of that school and the students' choice to die.

Another school with high-profile suicides recently is NYU - several students have jumped eight stories off the library in Washington Square over the past few years, killing themselves. Those were especially gorey because the students jumped into an area at the base of the library that had large crowds. However, NYU has 36,000 students so a suicide once per year is about what you would expect, unfortunately.