As parents deluge the campus this weekend visiting their first-year children, they may be worrying about more than just how much homework
Johnny has, or whether Jane is getting enough sleep at night. In accordance with the 1998 Clery Act, the government has recently published
a website containing crime statistics for the nations 6,000 colleges and universities, allowing parents and students to compare campus crime between schools. While this website can be a valuable resource, we caution users to take the statistics with a grain of salt, or two.
For one thing, parents might notice that Yale appears to have a far safer campus than Harvard does this despite the fact that New Haven has more murders, theft and violent crime than Cambridge, according to the U.S.
Justice Department. We find it hard to believe that given these facts,
Yale students actually witness fewer aggravated assaults and burglaries
that Harvard students do. What seems more likely is that Yale has narrowly interpreted the governments requirement that schools include crimes committed on reasonably contiguous places.
By all accounts Harvard University has interpreted this requirement
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