The Daily Beast:

[H]ow do America’s colleges stack up against each other, safety-wise? Specifically, which schools have the worst crime records? For that determination, The Daily Beast decided to look 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 freshman raped and murdered in her dorm in 1986 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.

The Daily Beast took the two most recent years of raw data from almost 9,000 schools and then further analyzed more than 4,000 (excluding two-year colleges, standalone graduate schools, etc.) over more than 50 different criteria, weighing different crimes against each other (murder carrying far more importance than, say, burglary), and factoring in incidents both on campus and nearby (since modern colleges, as everyone acknowledges, don’t stop strictly at the gates of the ivory towers). Local FBI data was also used to make the statistics as up-to-date as possible. (See full methodology below.) Schools were also judged on a students-per-capita basis so that large universities like Michigan State weren’t penalized when compared with small colleges like Amherst.

For a detailed description of the methodology, see here.

Here are the 25 most dangerous colleges in America:

1. Emerson (Boston, MA)
2. St. Xavier (Chicago, IL)
3. Maryland-Baltimore (Baltimore, MD)
4. Tufts (Medford, MA)
5. MIT (Cambridge, MA)
6. Maryland-Eastern Shore (Princess Anne, MD)
7. Grambling State (Grambling, LA)
8. South Carolina State (Orangeburg, SC)
9. Bowie State (Bowie MD)
10. North Carolina Central (Durham, NC)
11. Fitchburg State (Fitchburg, MA)
12. Illinois Institute of Technology (Chicago, IL)
13. Hampton (Hampton, VA)
14. Baltimore (Baltimore, MD)
15. Norfolk State (Norfolk, VA)
16. California State-Monterey Bay (Monterey Bay, CA)
17. Springfield (Springfield, MA)
18. Brown (Providence, RI)
19. Buffalo State (Buffalo, NY)
20. Harvard (Cambridge, MA)
21. Alabama A&M (Huntsville, AL)
22. New Jersey Institute of Technology (Newark, NJ)
23. Yale (New Haven, CT)
24. UC-Riverside (Riverside, CA)
25. College of Saint Rose (Albany, NY)

For criticism of the methodology, see

• Boston Globe
• Inside Higher Ed