The Top 25 Safest Colleges

>>>>Following the Yale murder and The Daily Beast’s ranking of the most crime-ridden campuses, we crunch the numbers again—this time to determine America’s safest schools.

In the aftermath of the murder of Yale doctoral student Annie Le, The Daily Beast conducted the exercise of attempting to discern how colleges stack up against each other safety-wise, and then highlighted the 25 schools—out of 4,000 measured—that performed the worst, based on statistics they provided the federal government plus our own methodology. Our rankings last week attracted a lot of attention, and in doing so led us to this natural follow-up: Rather than just focus on campuses where crime is an issue, why not also try to determine which schools are the safest?

Hence, the list we have assembled here, the 25 safest colleges in America. Unlike the Top 25 in football or basketball, this contest was open to any and all schools with a few caveats. First, we increased our minimum enrollment threshold for consideration to 6,000 students, because there are thousands of very small colleges that don’t have the same set of issues as larger schools (that a 275-student bible college has less crime per capita than a major state university yields no discernable lessons). Second, we knocked out graduate-only and two-year schools, again searching for more apples-to-apples comparisons. And finally, we excluded commuter colleges. It turns out that many of the safest schools in America are urban universities, but our methodology holds that it’s hard to compare schools that host students a few hours a day, versus those responsible around-the-clock. So our rule was firm: If you have dorms for at least some of your students, you’re in; if not, you’re out.

We then looked at the numbers. Specifically, for the past two decades, most colleges and universities nationwide have been required under the federal Clery Act—named for a Lehigh University freshman raped and murder in her dorm before her parents discovered there’d been a slew of violent incidents at the university—to report annually to the U.S. Department of Education about crimes on and near campus, including murder, assault, sexual offenses and robberies.>>>>

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-09-24/the-top-25-safest-colleges/

Most acts of violence occurs at the hands of people that we know.

#6, The University of Montana
Student Population: 13,628
The University of Montana helps keeps crime low with a sophisticated GPS
system that spans the entire 220-acre campus. GPS, of course, stands for
Grizzly Personal Safety, named after the school’s mascot, and is the
school’s campus escort program. (No, not in that way.) Escorts zip around
in electric golf carts, whisking students across campus to their dorms.
“We are also geographically in a pretty good position,” says Jim Lemcke,
director of the Office of Public Safety. “We’re not in a big city with a
lot of crime.” Most of the incidents reported were non-violent, according
to the data reported by the school to the U.S. Department of Education.

I always speak HIGHLY of the GRIZ.

I'm a Marshall U alum and back in 95 and 96 we played you folks for the 1AA National Football Championships here in Huntington.

Finest bunch of fans I've ever met. I'd like to think we are too.

We tailgaited together before and after the game with Grizzly fans. Wonderful, fun people.

But here's what I could never quite figure out, in 95 you beat us, won the National Championship and then changed your school colors and went from being the Bobcats to the Griz.

Then we we're lucky enough to win in 95. (Course we had Randy Moss that year)

Anyway, all the Best!!

Wow I just saw the list and Marshall came in 16.

Love that school and the people who work/go there. Special place.

I guess a low crime rate is one perk to feeling like you're going to school in the middle of nowhere! (Actually, Huntsville's a pretty nice town, but I know much of the student body who came from Houston found it to be way too small. I came from an even smaller city, so it wasn't that big of a deal to me.) The ghostly Sam Houston statue as you come into town is probably the scariest thing you'll encounter there! haha

#13, Utah State University
Image: Donna Barry / Utah State University
Student Population: 14,893
For years Morgan Quitno Press, a research and publishing company, has ranked Logan, Utah, as one of the safest metropolitan areas in the country. No surprise then that Logan’s Utah State is one of the nation’s safest schools. “Generally our students are conservative so we have good students, we have good faculty, and we live in a safe community,” says Utah State Police Chief Steve Mecham. “We’re working together—that’s where we maintain the safety that we have.”

Take that you liberal trouble makers!