Princeton Declared Thievingest Ivy
One of the things we learned when compiling Ivy crime stats back in August was that universities get to report or withhold pretty much anything they want. If someone steals the entire contents of your dorm room, but there's no sign of forced entry, sorry! That's larceny, not burglary, so as far as the public knows, it never happened.
Harvard's Zach Seward -- he of Summers-scooping, academic-probation fame -- has a good piece on the subject in yesterday's Wall Street Journal, detailing how universities game the system. Seward also re-calculates Ivy crime data to include both kinds of theft, yielding the authoritative chart at right on which school is the robbingest.
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Read more: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, crime, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton, Yale, zach seward
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October 24th, 2006 at 1:45 pm
Fabulous. Does the same apply for other oft-touted statistics?
October 24th, 2006 at 3:01 pm
interesting, considering how the two urban universities (penn and columbia) compare to those who are not considered to be in a “bad part of town” (i.e. princeton and dartmouth)
October 24th, 2006 at 4:55 pm
is fifteen minutes from trenton. if i lived anywhere near a town with that many jerkasses, i’d steal from them too.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
I wonder what this graph looks like when scaled to the populations of the respective schools.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
It is scaled…
“Incidents on Ivy League campuses per 10,000 students.”
October 24th, 2006 at 6:16 pm
good grief…we get at least one or two security alerts for robberies a week. if we’re dead last, then i can’t even imagine what the hell is going on down in jersey. now i have a mental image of princeton looking like “bonfire of the vanities”’s bronx.
October 24th, 2006 at 6:32 pm
Maybe it’s the other way around–you’re dead last BECAUSE OF the 1-2 security alerts weekly.
October 24th, 2006 at 7:47 pm
The numbers reported might be for on-campus incidents only. Most crimes at Cornell take place in Collegetown which is not considered “on-campus.” I’m sure the same is true for Columbia.
October 24th, 2006 at 11:12 pm
A barnard super was stabbed this past week and numerous people have been held up at gunpoint in the past few weeks in the Morningside area. While my iPod may be safe, I doubt many princetonians are having gats pulled on them.
October 25th, 2006 at 9:52 am
Are they including bike thefts in the Princeton stats? ‘Cause it’s not the townie’s fault those rich kids never lock their wheels and leave them out overnight.
But, yeah, I have to second Big Red and Columbian’s viewpoints. Only lookign at the microculture of a university is by no means a fair measure of student safety. If you counted off-campus crimes, UPen would skyrocket up the listings.
October 25th, 2006 at 12:53 pm
What Nate says is true, though I have to say that, recent rash of robberies and assaults aside, the Columbia precinct is pretty darn safe and residents fare far better than their counterparts in Philly or Boston, (and lets not even dare discuss New Haven…living there is a crime in and of itself)
October 25th, 2006 at 1:19 pm
Having been at Columbia for four years, I can say this year has been odd for its string of muggings and robberies. For the past three years I have always felt safe on campus and on the walk back to my dorm. I’m always surprised that the guards are always at their posts, for a school so racked by problems with every other part of administration.
October 26th, 2006 at 10:49 am
How odd. You’d think Princeton, in its wealthy suburb, would have fewer crimes than its urban counterparts.
November 1st, 2006 at 6:28 pm
Erf & brownie: interesting to note that some of these schools have student bodies much smaller than 10,000. dartmouth, for example, is a little less than half that size.