KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Tuition may not be the most troubling concern for parents sending sons and daughters off to college.
A disturbing pattern of violent crime has erupted across the nation’s campuses— from Yale University, where a female graduate student was strangled, to the University of California at Los Angeles, where a chemistry student was stabbed repeatedly in a lab.
While saying that campuses almost always are safer than their surrounding communities, Jonathan Kassa of Security On Campus Inc. acknowledged that the headlines can create the opposite impression.
“This has been a very uniquely deadly and brutal first semester, so there is concern,” said Kassa, the executive director of the nonprofit organization, which seeks to reduce campus crime.
This month at Sacramento State University in California, a student was beaten to death in his dormitory by a bat-wielding roommate. A football player was fatally knifed at the University of Connecticut.
In September, a Kansas City woman was killed by a stray bullet on a campus in Atlanta.
In May, a student was shot down while working in the bookstore cafe at Wesleyan University in Connecticut.
“Those big incidents do worry me, but I worry more about the more regular types of crimes,” said Elise Higgins, a senior at the University of Kansas whose friend was mugged on campus a year ago.
“That made me really aware that I can be vulnerable even when I’m on campus around buildings I’m familiar with.”
Kassa said that sensational tragedies not only distort the college picture, but can distract students from the bigger problems of theft, assault, stalking, sex offenses and alcohol abuse. Parents and students should be aware of four important points about crimes at colleges: Four of five cases are student on student. Most victims are men. More offenses occur off campus. Alcohol is involved 90 percent of the time.
Deadly crime is rare on campuses, Kassa said, and statistics give no indication it is increasing.
There have been no murders, on or off campus, at area universities since 2005, when three KU students in an off-campus apartment died at the hands of an arsonist, and an elderly MU professor was found slain in a campus garage.
Since 1990, all colleges and universities in federal financial aid programs annually report crimes on and near their campuses to the U.S. Department of Education. The data are passed to the Justice Department.
In 2007, the latest year for which national numbers are available, 48 killings occurred on the nation’s four-year campuses.
That year, however, a mentally ill student gunned down 32 people at Virginia Tech.
The year before, eight people died violently on the nation’s more than 4,000 campuses, down from 11 in 2005.
Since the Virginia Tech rampage, all universities have tried to prepare for the rare incident of a person on campus with a gun.
Robbery is a far more common campus crime. Hundreds occur each year. Thieves commit most of the crimes at area schools.
Crimes of opportunity are most prevalent, campus police said, because students walk away from a laptop or iPod or leave their cars or dorm rooms unlocked.
Whether a school is nestled among cornfields or next to inner-city neighborhoods can affect the amount of crime.
The Web site The Daily Beast recently analyzed 4,000 reports from public and private four-year schools and said the New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury, Long Island, with 11,831 students, was the safest in the country.
The least safe campus on the list was Emerson College, an arts-focused school in Boston.
In The Daily Beast’s survey, many urban campuses fared poorly, including Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Maryland at Baltimore and Tufts University in Medford, Mass., outside Boston.
A few weeks ago, a UMKC student was mugged walking home from the business school. Kipp Cozad, a UMKC graduate student from Liberty, Mo., heard about it, “but I have never felt uncomfortable here.”
Cozad said she takes many night classes, but “I park fairly close and I never find myself drifting off where there aren’t people around.”
Surprisingly, experts say crime can occur less often on urban campuses because students there expect it and act accordingly. At more rural schools, students might feel more secure and take fewer precautions.
In the last two years, campuses nationwide have installed electronic alert systems, key card systems for dorms and more lighting; created student security escorts; and re-evaluated emergency response plans.
Crime comes in spurts and cycles, but for the most part is fairly steady, said Don Stubbings, a crime prevention officer for the K-State Police Department.
“Let’s say burglars move on or near campus one year; the next year they are gone.
That crime tapers off, and then a different crime is up,” Stubbings said.“Campus crime is not new,” said Kassa of Security On Campus Inc.
“You can’t stop it all. You can’t control everything, search everyone, but you can reduce the risks and strengthen the response. Be prepared.”