Don’t send your daughter to college here: University rankings for sexual assault

It’s a sad fact that parents of daughters need to think about sexual assault when sending their children to college. One in every five women, or more, are sexually assaulted in college, usually in the first year. In the #MeToo era, it’s important to realize that this college period of risk is perhaps the highest in any woman’s life.

A few years ago, as my daughter went to college, I decided to put my statistician hat on and crunch the numbers of risk for sexual assault at various schools she was considering.

I even wondered whether it made sense to have a new college ranking list, based on sexual assault risk. I found that there was a way to make that list, and so here I present a version of what I found.

Follow the numbers, but the bottom line is that there are some colleges women should not attend (like Brown and Amherst College) and no colleges where they are really safe. At best, one in twenty will be sexually assaulted, but the average conservative proven estimate is about one in twelve, and it is likely worse due to underreporting of assaults.

Let’s point out a few basic facts, which I’ll follow with some hard numbers for parents, like me, of women going to college.

Some basic facts:

1. Colleges (and high schools) generally hide and minimize sexual assault on campus. Despite their public pronouncements, many, if not most, colleges (and high schools) do not emphasize this problem. It’s a rational reaction. They wouldn’t want to get bad publicity that would discourage others from attending their schools. So parents should remember that whatever strengths exist in a school, transparency about sexual assault and harassment is not one of them.

2. Sexual trauma is frequent in colleges. The traditional frequency often cited is 20%. That number, if true, is outrageous. If it was anywhere near this figure, we would be dealing with an epidemic.

3. There are a number of qualitative predictors of increased risk of sexual assault. There are few systematic studies of this topic, but lawyers who specialize in assisting victims of sexual assault in high schools and colleges report the following risk factors:

a. Prestigious schools

b. Expensive schools

c. Presence of fraternities

d. Presence of athletic scholarships

What these risk factors share in common is that they attract entitled males, who operate in an ethos of alcohol and sexual aggressiveness. Parents who want to minimize risk to daughters should avoid schools with any three of the above four characteristics.

The prototype perpetrator is a male on an athletic scholarship who belongs to a fraternity and attends an expensive and/or prestigious school.

Now to the rankings:

During the Obama administration a new requirement was instituted for universities to report sexual assault figures. There is a federal government website for campus safety, with all the numbers since 2014 when schools were required to report.

The main critique made of these figures is that they are voluntary and that some schools may report assaults more openly and accurately than others. In general, it is widely accepted that sexual assault is underreported. A reasonably well-established figure is that about 80% are not reported (meaning one in 5 are reported). Thus, in the analysis that follows a statistical adjustment was made to multiply reported figures by five. The rankings that follow provide the unadjusted reported rates, and the adjusted rates.

So here are the numbers, with a ranking of selected universities, mostly East Coast:

Where ranges are given, the mean number is taken for adjusted calculations (e.g., for a range of 10–17, the mean of 13.5 is used)

In summary:

1. The average reported US university sexual assault rate for women is about 0.4% per year, or about 2% per year when adjusted for underreporting. That’s about 8% for the entire college experience, or 1 in 12 women. Almost all assaults happen on campus.

2. Some universities are worse, especially private northeastern universities, with conservative estimation of about 20–25% rates of sexual assault on women over 4 years. Obviously Brown University and Amherst College have very high rates; a criticism could be that they just report sexual assaults more readily than other schools. Even if this is the case, it still would not argue for sending women to a school where they have a proven one in four or five chance of being sexually assaulted.

These likely are conservative estimates, since the reported figures could be even lower than the 80% underreporting rate that is assumed in this analysis. For example, the University of Texas at Austin has the lowest numbers in the above table, but in an anonymous survey of students and alumni, 15% of women reported having been sexually assaulted ruing their college years there. If this number is true, then the adjustment multiplier of 4 would have to be changed to about 12 (the unadjusted reported rate of 0.25% per year, or 1 % for four years, multiplied by 12 equals 12%). In that case, the typical frequency of assaults in the average university (the adjusted reate of 0.39% per year) would approach 20% over 4 years (0.39% multiplied by 12 per year for four years = 18.9%).

Also a recent survey found that women later report about 12–20% range of sexual assault in college. Those numbers would be consistent with these figures as being very conservative estimates.

In sum, with a very conservative estimate based on actual reported sexual assaults with a small adjustment for underreporting, the range of likely sexual assault rates is from 3 to 7% overall for most colleges in this sample over 4 years. That’s about 1 in 20 women. In the highest risk universities, the risk is notably higher, being in the range of 20–25% over 4 years, or one in every four to five women. The average overall is 8% in 4 years, or 1 in 12 women.

Since the colleges tend to keep such matters quiet, parents have to protect their daughters themselves. These rankings may help parents weigh the risks as they decide where to their daughters to college.