<p>I agree (my grandfather grew up in Olney, so I know that area well, and concur with your description).</p>
<p>It’s also of note that I think expectations have changed as to how much a college “owes” protection of personal safety versus years ago. </p>
<p>As an example, when I was in college, there was an incident where a man got into our sorority house (well, not that men weren’t often found in the house, of course, but I mean of the uninvited variety) and accosted a girl who was studying alone in the basement, trying to force her into a lower-level bathroom – she screamed and he ran. And yet amazingly … we all just thought of it as “oh, stuff happens” and beyond changing the locks, nothing much was done – I certainly don’t remember the administration getting involved. These days? If an incident of that nature occurred, a college administration would be all over it, there would be patrols, escort services, seminars on personal safety and self-defense. Letters would be sent to all parents describing the incident and what the administration was doing in response. I don’t think Evanston, as a suburban-quasi-urban setting, is any safer or less-safe than it was 20 years ago, and yet NU has far more escort services and rides for students than it used to. Is it babying them a bit? Is there some level of learn-how-to-walk-at-night-with-proper-precautions that is indeed part of growing up? I do think so, although it’s easy for me to say that when it’s my son going to NU, not my daughter, and she’s tucked away in a very safe and boring suburban area where the only crime is the price of a latte these days.</p>
<p>I suspect that if you really want to prevent risk of harm to your kids at college, you’d be better off focussing not on crime around campus, but on whether kids have and use cars.</p>
<p>Wow, that’s surprising. I attended UChicago equally many, many eons ago and recall exactly 1 student (that I personally knew) having a problem during the 10 years I lived there. Maybe I was just oblivious or maybe no one talked about being mugged because it was routine. I personally used to walk alone at all hours of the night which was incredibly stupid and highly unrecommended, but I had just spent the summer at Bedford-Stuy (during the infamous “NYC Blackout” summer yet) and thought I was really tough. Again, issue of familiarity.</p>
<p>I was at Yale about 30 years ago as an undergraduate, and I can’t recall anybody I know being a victim of crime except for some theft. My son is there now, and it’s about the same (although there is WAY more security). At Yale, though, and perhaps at other schools, the situation may be worse for graduate students. A lot of them live off-campus, and some in relatively rundown areas. They are more likely to to be going back and forth late at night alone.</p>
<p>The crime logs won’t tell you much. The most unsafe places in the U.S. for teen women are upscale residential colleges - with more rapes, sexual assaults, and assaults - than even the “worst” neighborhood in America. Fewer than 1 in 20 of these crimes are reported. One estimate suggests than 1 in 5 American college women will experience rape or sexual assault on a residential college campus. The criminals? College men.</p>
<p>I lived in West Philadelphia for 12 years in the 70s and 80s, and never experienced a problem. There were far more crimes committed by students on the Penn campus itself. I also lived in Hyde Park for three years prior to that. That was a little more sketchy. But I have no idea how it is today.</p>
<p>I’m a student at UMD College Park. I’m not going to say it’s a great area, but that being said despite it’s bad reputation, I’ve never felt unsafe on campus, even at night. I would never walk around off campus on my own late, but that’s just common sense.
I’m from a pretty sheltered neighborhood, but my high school was known for crime and the stabbing my sophomore year. But most of my feelings on safety come from my parents. They are from Queens, and most of my mother’s extended family lived in a South Bronx neighborhood where her grandfather would pay the kid on the stoop five dollars to watch the car while they went into visit. That has always been the definition of unsafe to me, and I would never dream of paying someone to watch my car in College Park.
I had a roommate last year who was afraid to leave campus on her own, even in the day, because she said it was unsafe. Her parents had drilled it into her. That being said, her father works less than five miles from the school. (NASA in Greenbelt)
From my point of view, parents pay a huge role in whether or not a kid feels safe. If they have made a huge deal about how unsafe a place is, then the kid will be scared, whether or not they admit it, but if a parent has slowly integrated a street smarts and a sense of when something is actually dangerous, the kid tends to be more well adjusted.</p>
<p>“Chicago has seemed much safer than San Francisco, to me. That goes double for the public transportation.”</p>
<p>After living in both areas, I am sad to say that statement is not true. Both cities have a good amount of violence in the form of property crime and mugging, but Chicago has a higher violent crime rate. Don’t let the relative lack of homeless people fool you. The statistics for Chicago show violent crime is 2.18 above the national average as opposed to San Franciso, which is 1.24 above the national average.</p>
<p>But you can’t talk about the overall crime rate of a city when you’re talking about the safety of college students there. This is why it’s such a fallacy for people to think that Columbia (for example) is dangerous because it’s near bad areas of Harlem.</p>
<p>True. Crimes against young women on the Columbia campus (by Columbia students) are far greater in number than anything they would face in “bad sections” of Harlem.</p>
<p>Still, Chicago neighborhods overall have higher crime rates than various San Francisco neighborhoods. If Chicago would become compliant with how they report crime statistics, they would not be listed among the safest cities. I bring up Chicago versus San Francisco because a previous poster mentioned relative safety, and because I am very familiar with both places. And most colleges do a lousy job of reporting their crime statistics, espcially rape because they often handle things “in house” with campus police. </p>
<p>It really is/isn’t safe anywhere. Crime can and does occur in Evanston and Nob Hill. What I hope that most people don’t do is allow crime to get in the way of choosing a great education.</p>
<p>The crime stats, even for on-campus crimes, are hard to parse. For example, in 2004, there were 3 reported “sex offenses–forcible” at Smith College, but only 2 at Columbia. There were 17 at Harvard that year (according to a chart I found). In a more recent year, Columbia had 14.</p>
<p>As an undergraduate, my son went to the University of Maryland at College Park, which only looks suburban. It’s really a city campus in many ways, the most important of which is that if you leave anything unattended, even momentarily, it vanishes. Even if you take precautions (like putting a lock on your bike), things get stolen. (My son had bikes stolen three times during his undergraduate years; there’s even a video from a security camera showing one of the thefts – which involved a guy with a gigantic pair of wire cutters making short work of the bicycle lock.)</p>
<p>Coming from that background, my son has perceived his graduate school, the University of California at San Diego, to be a very safe place. Yet I’m sure there are kids who do not feel as relaxed as he does on UCSD’s large campus. </p>
<p>On the other hand, I have been to colleges where kids reserve seats for themselves in the dining halls by putting their laptops on the tables while they go get their food. These kids are not prepared to live in the real world, and heaven help them if they decide to go to graduate school at UMCP.</p>
<p>Yes, Hunt, i would agree that graduate students probably saw the worst of it at Yale. But the undergrads in the lab (which was in the medical school) had had multiple experiences as well. One poor graduate student learned her lesson on day one. She was going up and down the steps to her apt while moving in, with her stuff outside. When she came back down her bike was gone. I lived on Mansfield St my first year. That was a bad neighborhood, but it was just one block from campus (actually bordering the ice rink). That was where I learned what a gunshot sounds like. And my landlord strongly suggested that I not cut through the backyard to get to campus. Something she did not wish to elaborate upon had happened to a previous female tenant… I also lived in a more upscale street (on the third floor of a professor’s house). His car stereo was stolen twice (as was our much crappier one) in the time we lived there. Most of the examples were theft, but there were more violent crimes, as well (one on St Ronan St-one of the fanciest areas near campus). I don’t remember feeling fearful, but it definitely meant that you had to be more careful.</p>
<p>“The crime stats, even for on-campus crimes, are hard to parse. For example, in 2004, there were 3 reported “sex offenses–forcible” at Smith College, but only 2 at Columbia. There were 17 at Harvard that year (according to a chart I found). In a more recent year, Columbia had 14.”</p>
<p>Indeed hard to parse. But the national figures I’ve seen say multiply by about 30, and you’ll be closer to the ballpark (that’s for rape; when you add sexual assault, estimates range as high as 1 in 5 female students over four years.) But even at these numbers, do you think there were 17 forcible sexual assaults on female students off-campus at Harvard in 2004? (or even at Yale? I strongly suspect that the Yale campus is far more dangerous for female students than the surrounding community.)</p>
<p>Then there are places like my alma mater (Williams), where virtually ALL the crimes - especially rapes, sexual assaults, and assaults - female students will experience will be on campus, and committed by their fellow students, who are criminals (and usually covered up by the administration as best they can.)</p>
<p>Suburban areas can be higher crime, and city areas can be lower crime. Just because an area is of suburban development density does not mean that it is lower crime.</p>
I question whether there were 17 assaults on campus at Harvard that most people would consider to be “forcible.” My problem with these statistics is with the definition of “forcible.” It includes sexual activity with a person who is incapable of providing consent because of temporary or permanent conditions. In other words, sex with a drunk person, or between two drunk people. Including that makes the statistics largely meaningless, in my opinion.</p>
<p>I was a grad student at the U of C in the late 70s. My sister lived in a mansion (really) in Kenwood for a number of years. My BIL grew up in Hyde Park.</p>
<p>There were shuttles running all over Hyde Park at night, plus security phones, for good reason. A friend of mine was assaulted when she unwisely walked home from a friend’s apt after midnight. Another friend was assaulted and had her jaw broken when she and her apartment-mates were walking home one evening. (It was a robbery: the assailants grabbed her and hit her until the others gave up their wallets.) One of my apartment mates drove another to the post office south of the midway to pick up a package. The tires on his car were slashed while he sat in the car outside the post office in broad daylight. (At the time, the campus police did not patrol south of the midway, although there were several schools and at least one dorm there.) My sister was robbed in her driveway, and her house had a high fence around the entire property and an extensive security system in the house itself.</p>
<p>These are only SOME of the stories. Hyde Park/Kenwood was generally very safe during the day, but at night it was a different story. The students were prey for enterprising thieves from the surrounding neighborhoods. I have spent plenty of time living and working in urban and low income neighborhoods, and I am not easily spooked. It is my understanding that the crime situation in Hyde Park has improved somewhat.</p>
<p>Marian–I’m not sure how long ago your son was here, but I couldn’t make it through orientation without being told nine times to only use a U-lock on campus. Honestly my bike has been next to the chemistry building for three weeks now with nothing happening. Also they go for the nicer bikes. A friend had a thousand dollar racing bike that people took the front tire and handlebars off of, but why would you bring that to any campus?</p>
<p>Also, College Park isn’t suburban. It’s a city. (One of the larger ones in the state) It only appears that way because it is next to DC.</p>
<p>And not related to my school, but the Columbia campus isn’t actually in Harlem is it? If it is it’s not in Harlem-Harlem…The hospital is in Washington Heights which is similar to Harlem so maybe that’s where that idea comes from?</p>