15 Worst College Crime Areas

musicprnt
Sat, 24 Apr 2010 11:53:03 +0000

I would be really careful with ‘statistics’ like this, they often indicate only what the person compiling them did, to try and sell a magazine article or get published. The problem with statistics like this is they can be misleading, to say the least. For example, I saw a stat that showed the most number of deaths by heart attack was in a certain zip code in Arizona…turned out to be a place with a huge concentration of senior citizen housing of all sorts (it also was one of the ‘oldest’ zip codes in the US)…

Property crimes are hard to define, because they cover a lot of crimes that most of us would look and say “it happens”. Things like Ipods and wallets and bags getting swiped; Ithaca college just had someone break into their music school earlier this year and vandalize a number of pianos seriously, a property crime; graffitti of all kinds happens, someone else thinks it would be clever to steal the school flag from a building, all are “property crimes”.

Or if, as someone pointed out, there is a low income housing complex that shares part of the zip code, that could be a statitics magnet, whereas the area as a whole is low (this is especially true in NYC, where housing projects are because of gentrification and other factors, in the middle of a high income/low crime zone in general). Problem is, people hear property crime and think it is some drugged out crazy robbing someone at knife point, and I can almost guarantee you a lot of those reported numbers are minor petty theft.

If you are interested in going to a school, it is more important to see the campus and area and look at a variety of things. For example, in the Urban schools, kids are routinely warned to be careful, and kids wouldn’t think of leaving their bag at a table someplace while ordering food, whereas in a more rural environment they may think they can or leave a door unlocked. Plus Urban schools tend to have strong security patrols, a lot of the time ex NYC cops work for NYU and Columbia, both of whom have large security groups. From what I am led to believe, at more rural/less urban schools, the security isn’t quite that strong (When I went to NYU, buildings all had NYU security, they didn’t use students as security). I wouldn’t let a list like this deter you, and more then I would let a list like US News and World Reports claims of ‘best colleges’ make the decision on where to go, both are too complex to be narrowed down to a list.

And having gone to NYU in the early 80’s, and a brother who went to Columbia in the late 70’s (when Morningside Heights was not a particularly good area), during the crack epidemic, high murder rates, huge homeless problems, I can tell you that crime was part of the distant background, not something we dealt with as a major factor (unlilke idiots pulling false alarms in the dorms at 2am in midwinter, someone else deciding they didn’t like tv and cutting the cable tv in the tv room on the night of a major sports playoff game), and while there were incidents, most of them were pretty petty. To be honest, with common sense and a bit of knowledge, it simply isn’t something we worried about all that much, we simply were as vigilant about that as wearing goggles and an apron in chem lab.
And as was shown by Virginia Tech, or the grad student killed at Yale, serious crime can happen anywhere, at any time, and maybe the better way is to be vigilant no matter where you are.