<p>The simple answer is that Yale is NOT more dangerous than other places. Very few Yale student experience violence while at Yale. The crime statistics are worse, per student, at places you may not even imagine are dangerous, like UC Berkeley.</p>
<p>As several other posters noted, perceptions of risk are notoriously unreliable. If you want to get useful info, you can look up the crime statistics for most universities online quite easily, as they have to report these.</p>
<p>That being said, New Haven is not the suburban or small town campus that some might prefer based on where they grew up and where they like to live. You have to keep your eyes open as in any other urban area (see the recent and many older threads on New Haven for more on this).</p>
<p>I think that it would be a big mistake for somebody to not apply only because of these recent events. Yale is actually safer than many other top schools… “In 2002–04, Yale reported 14 violent crimes (homicide, aggravated assault, or sex offenses), when Harvard reported 83 such incidents, Princeton 24, and Stanford 54” (From Wikipedia). Yale is, for the most part, very safe, and campus security is taken very seriously here by the administration. The murder of Annie Le was a premeditated crime that could have happened anywhere. Yale does everything in its power to have the best security, but sometimes no amount of money or precaution can prevent an act of pure evil, scary as it is.</p>
<p>It is quite clear why the harvard dorm murder didn’t get the press it should have. The deceased was NOT a student there. He was supposedly involved in some sort of drug transaction/robbery with enrolled students at Harvard. So the bottom line here is a GUN found its way into a Harvard DORM where innocent students are going about their daily lives.</p>
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<li><p>Neither the victim nor the assailants were Harvard students.</p></li>
<li><p>Both the victim and the assailants were drug dealers who were meeting on the Harvard campus, because it was a convenient place for them to meet. (One lived nearby, the others were visiting a friend at Harvard.)</p></li>
<li><p>The extent of involvement by Harvard students has never been clear, in part because the university has pretty successfully put a gag on everyone.</p></li>
<li><p>I though it received a lot of press. If it didn’t get the same tabloid tsunami as the Annie Le case, it is probably because the victim was far from innocent (and was male), and the case was essentially solved within a single news cycle.</p></li>
</ol>