“Honestly, I think two categories of people tend to overvalue severely the amount of crime on and around the University of Chicago campus: People who went to college there in the 1970s and 1980s, and people who live in affluent neighborhoods in the Chicago suburbs or Northside.”
This is an overgeneralization.
A good number of “affluent” families in and around the Chicago area send their kids to the place and/or to Lab. As do alums who attended during the bad old days. The Northside and some of those affluent suburbs are peppered with UChicago alums. Heck, we lived in one such “affluent suburb” (all right - the poor section of it) and we had at least two UChicago faculty living within easy walking distance. And that was 20 years ago.