2024 College Campus Crime Report and Statistics

Colleges with the Most and Least On-Campus Crime

The U.S. is home to well over 5,000 degree-granting colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning. However, many aren’t exactly “colleges” — at least not for this study. After all, that number includes institutions that don’t really have campuses to speak of or are professional academies, such as X-ray tech schools.

Many institutions have enrollment numbers so low that incidents reported would be more heavily weighted than appropriate. That’s why, for this analysis, we’ve limited our scope to those institutions with enrollment of at least 5,000.

That left us with just over 600 schools, and only six percent of those schools had no reported on-campus crimes in a year. The data in this section include total rates for the following crimes:

• Rape
• Robbery
• Murder
• Aggravated assault
• Negligent manslaughter
• Arson
• Fondling
• Statutory rape
• Burglary
• Motor vehicle theft

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Prairie View A&M University, Stanford University, and the University of New Mexico (Main Campus) topped the list of institutions with the highest crime rates in our ranking, with Prairie View A&M reporting 15.3 crimes per 1,000 students. These high numbers are often attributed to the campuses' locations and sizes. For instance, Stanford and UC Berkeley are large universities situated in densely populated urban areas, which can lead to higher crime rates due to the larger student bodies and increased interaction with surrounding communities.

The University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus (with locations in Aurora and Denver) is an outlier on the list above, as it has no student housing. However, the campuses have many public facilities, such as a children’s hospital, VA medical center, and substance abuse rehabilitation center. With more people coming and going onto the urban campuses, the possibility of crimes increases.

Despite being smaller and more isolated, Dartmouth College and the University of Notre Dame still had significant crime rates.

Source: U.S. Department of Education

In stark contrast, institutions like St. Petersburg College, Santa Monica College, and San Diego Mesa College boasted exceptionally low crime rates, with only one reported crime each and rates as low as 0.04 per 1,000 students. Many of these schools are community colleges, and most students commute daily to the campus. Since seven out of ten schools in the list above don’t provide on-campus housing, this might indicate that on-campus crimes are more prevalent in residential campuses.

On the other hand, Long Island University, the University of Missouri at St. Louis, and CUNY Hunter College all offer on-campus housing to students. Interestingly, these three universities are in major metropolitan areas, which tend to have higher crime rates than more remote areas.

Colleges with Most and Least Crime by State

Which schools in each state have the highest and lowest total crime rates? We determined which schools have the best and worst rates among the states with more than two four-year colleges (not including colleges that didn’t report any crimes).

Colleges with the highest and lowest crime rates in each state
Crime rate per 1,000 students

Colleges with the highest and lowest crime rates

Colleges with the Most and Least Violent Crime

Now, we’ll explore violent crimes on campuses. In this report, violent crime includes rape, robbery, murder, aggravated assault, negligent manslaughter, arson, fondling, and statutory rape. Our analysis revealed that 86 percent of schools reported violent acts on campus, with a total of 9,727 violent crimes on campuses nationwide in 2022.

Source: U.S. Department of Education

The schools with the highest violent crime rates often reflect broader trends in the cities or regions where they are located, alongside specific campus-related factors. For example, Bowie State University in Bowie, MD, and Winston-Salem State University in Winston-Salem, NC, are situated in areas that have experienced higher rates of violent crime. Although Bowie is a suburban area, it’s near Washington, D.C., where violent crime rates have risen. Similarly, Winston-Salem has faced challenges with violent crime in recent years.

Stanford University and Vanderbilt University have both had high-profile crimes that garnered significant media attention. Stanford University is now well-known for student Brock Turner’s high-profile rape, which he committed on the campus in 2015. Similarly, in 2013, Vanderbilt football players committed and filmed acts of sexual violence against a fellow student on campus, which made national headlines. In some cases, these types of incidents can raise awareness and lead to increased reporting of violent crimes on campuses. High-profile cases also highlight systemic issues within the institutions, such as inadequate security measures or insufficient support for victims.

Interestingly, Stanford and Vanderbilt are not the only prestigious universities to top the violent crime ranking. Yale University in New Haven, CT, and Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH, are some of America’s most selective universities. This demonstrates that even prestigious institutions or those in smaller communities are not immune to violent crimes.

In addition to ranking for high violent crime rates in general, Prairie View A&M University and the University of New Mexico also had some of the highest rates of crimes violating the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA): stalking, dating violence, and domestic violence.

Source: U.S. Department of Education

Like property crime, violent crime may be less common at schools where the students are entirely or primarily commuters. Only one of the ten schools with the lowest violent crime rates offers on-campus housing: Indian River State College in Fort Pierce, FL.

Without on-campus housing, students are less likely to be present on campus during late night hours when many violent crimes occur. This reduces opportunities for crimes such as assault, robbery, and rape, which may be more easier to commit under the cover of darkness or the influence of alcohol.

Colleges with the Most and Least Property Crime

When considering a college, the rate of car or property theft might not immediately come to mind as a deciding factor. Still, in 2022, 9,679 property crimes were reported on four-year college campuses nationwide. Property crime, including burglary and motor vehicle theft, impacted 84 percent of the schools in the database in one year. This widespread occurrence highlights the prevalence of property-related offenses at colleges of all sizes and locations.

Source: U.S. Department of Education

The University of New Mexico-Main Campus also topped the list of schools with high violent crime rates. The university's location inevitably impacts its on-campus crime rates in Albuquerque, a city with high property crime rates. Similarly, the University of Colorado Denver/ Anschutz Medical Campus has locations in Denver and Aurora, major urban areas with particularly high motor vehicle theft rates.

The University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University are some of California’s most prestigious research institutions. However, the presence of valuable research equipment and even construction sites could attract thieves. For example, $40,000 of construction equipment was stolen from UC Berkeley in 2024. Recently, Stanford University also experienced a surge of car (and car part) thefts, and campus officials had to warn students to remain vigilant.

Methodology

Our figures on crime across American college campuses came from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education, which maintains a robust database on Campus Safety and Security incidents reported by all institutions of higher learning nationwide.

The crime data we used holds reports for 5,684 institutions. We limited our scope to offenses that took place on campus at four-year non-profit colleges, community colleges, and universities with at least 5,000 students.

We excluded Southern New Hampshire University since more than 90 percent of its students attend classes only online, and we also excluded the University of Maryland Global Campus as it is 100 percent online. We also excluded Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as the joint campus split into two separate universities in July 2024. The final number of schools meeting our report's requirements was 622.

All rankings reported only included institutions with reported acts that meet the definition. For example, if a school had no reported property crimes, it would not appear in the rankings.

Satellite campuses/branches are combined under the institution name they belong to. The numbers were calculated from the full dataset found here. The institutions' crime data were not subjected to independent verification by the U.S. Department of Education.