In a story for its March issue, entitled “Is Your College Student Safe at School?,“ Reader’s Digest attempted to evaluate the level of safety at colleges and universities nationwide. U-M, which ranked 34th nationally, received an A for its security performance. While the story claims that shootings at Northern Illinois University and Virginia Tech prompted the story, the study Readers Digest conducted did little to address the problems in those cases.
The study’s ratings are based on nineteen, self-reported survey questions presented to universities. All of the questions regard security at on-campus buildings, mostly dorms. Questions include “the percentage of students in dorms with full-time security, “the percentage of students in dorms with camera” and the existence of a “mass emergency response system.” Yet as the study’s methodology reveals all variables were given equal weight in the study, so an emergency response plan is just as valuable as the number of full-time university police and the “percentage of students in dorms with sprinkler systems.”
Since neither the Virginia Tech or Illinois State shootings happened in dormitories these questions seem completely irrelevant to accessing that sort of safety. The article does, much later, include anecdotal accounts, such as the infamous murder at EMU last year, which may have been prevented by these types of security features. It also points out that students often ignore or flaunt these features, leaving doors propped open or letting people enter buildings behind them.
Furthermore, while the study does account for the size of each college it fails to recognize that small schools such as Maine’s Bowdoin College, which ranked nineteenth nationally, are likely to have a much higher share of students living in dorms that say U-M. Since the article is directed at parents, it may give them a sense of the safety available in on-campus housing but forgets to remind them that students at schools like U-M are likely to vacate university housing by their sophomore, or definitely junior year.
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The only problem is that the ranking might make people too comfortable. I doubt Ann Arbor could rank low compared to other college towns, and a simple compilation of FBI statistics would confirm that.
Brian,
I agree the rating does not give anyone a false impression of safety in Ann Arbor. The town, overall, is quite safe for students. But that truth has little to do with how Reader’s Digest looked at universities.
The kinds of variables it used and the way it analyzed them remains shoddy. A few slight changes to this framework, like placing more weight on full-time front door workers, could have skewed the results against U-M.
The Campus Affiars Journal at the University of Michigan
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