We've received a lot of mail regarding last week's post about Pomona College President David Oxtoby's email concerning a possible Forbes.com article potentially ranking Pomona College in the top-5 of US colleges in terms of per-capita crime rates. From: David Oxtoby
Oxtoby had indicated that Forbes might post the article by the end of last week. That never happened, so it is possible that Oxtoby's concerns about Forbes' methodology being flawed may have convinced the magazine to not run the article or that they needed to reconsider their survey before posting the article.
In any event, the article has not run. In the meantime, we give you Oxtoby's email in its entirety, and we'll let you decide:
Sent: Tuesday, April 03, 2007 12:01 PM
To: Staff
Subject: Forbes article
To: The Pomona College Community
From: David Oxtoby, President
I am writing to let you know in advance about an article to appear on the Forbes.com Website later this week that will portray the College in a troubling and unfair light. Using the U.S. Department of Education campus crime statistics for the year 2005, a Forbes reporter is finalizing an article ranking American colleges according to the amount of crime reported on their campuses during that year. Depending upon how they parse the numbers, we may be listed in the top five for campuses with the most crime per capita -- possibly even at number one.
Obviously, this runs counter our own experience -- that this is an exceptionally safe campus. The main reasons for this unlikely ranking are twofold. First, the number of reported thefts at Pomona in 2005 was abnormally high -- 71 as compared to 41 in 2004 and 33 in 2006. (A big part of this spike was due to one group of juveniles who were caught and stopped.) Second, the number of reported "motor vehicle thefts" on our campus in 2005 was listed at 13. This misleading statistic includes 11 cases of unauthorized use of a golf cart.
I would stress that the safety of our campus community is not in question here. The number of thefts in 2005 was a genuine concern, not to be dismissed or minimized. However, it is important to note that reported crimes against people on our campus were virtually non-existent that year, and that they remain among the lowest in our peer group of colleges.
Paradoxically, our vulnerability to theft may be exacerbated by the fact that our students feel so safe on this campus that they sometimes neglect to lock their doors. We have been working to encourage them to take more reasonable precautions to safeguard their property, and we hope to continue to bring those numbers down in the future.
In reporting alleged criminal incidents, Pomona makes a strong effort to follow the letter of the reporting rules laid down by the Department of Education in compliance with the Clery Act. These rules specifically require campuses to report items involving golf carts and joy riding. We are also required to include any incident reported to campus security, even if no police report is ever filed.
In truth, I believe the article and chart to be printed in Forbes say more about the magazine's methodology than they do about the relative security of Pomona's campus. If Forbes' intent was to identify campuses where personal security is a problem, then they have clearly failed. Pomona is, and will continue to be, a very safe place to live and work.
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Pomona Staff Mailing List
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The OPE website allows you to compare any single institution's crime rate with that of a given geographical area. (It doesn't allow for ranking the schools as Forbes apparently tried to do.)
Below is a table showing Pomona College's crime stats compared with average numbers for 9,209 other colleges and universities in the United States. Pomona College is the "Target Campus." The data is for 2001-2005, and the comparison group averages are shown to the right of Pomona's numbers:
As you can see, the 2004 and 2005 burglary numbers (what Oxtoby referred to as "theft") match up with the numbers Oxtoby cited. The 2006 numbers are not posted yet on the OPE website.
The anomalous 2005 burglary numbers are indeed well above the average, as Oxtoby indicated. However, the 2004 numbers are also twice as high as the national average. The 2003 numbers are also above the average.
We ran the same comparison for several specific areas of the country (Far West, Northeast, Great Plains) and found Pomona College 2004 and 2005 burglary stats above average for those geographical regions as well.
Burglary was the only area where Pomona was far above the average. Recall that he said that the burglary (theft) numbers dropped to 33 in 2006, and he attributed that 2005 spike to a small group of juveniles who were apparently apprehended. The high 2004 numbers could also indicate that the burglary ring was active during that year as well. In fact, the numbers seem to build from a 2001 low of only six incidents (below the national average) and peak in 2005.
So, Oxtoby may be right in pointing out the anomalous burglary numbers, and apart from those Pomona College's crime numbers are no worse and are in some cases better than the average U.S. college. The numbers, though, aren't measured on a per-capita basis. With an enrollment of only about 1,500, Pomona could still have a relatively high per-capita crime rate.
The University of Southern California, which has 32,150 students, is not listed on the OPE site, but the USC website has a 2005-2006 Annual Security report that lists a table with 2002, 2003 and 2004 crime statistics (beginning page 15). In 2004, USC's main Univeristy Park campus had 47 burglaries reported on campus; in 2003 they had 91 burglaries; and in 2002 they had 107. Here is a comparison of burglary incidents per 1,000 students:
Even the lower 2006 burglary number cited by Oxtoby (33) was higher per capita (22) than any of the USC stats listed above.
The per-capita vehicle theft rates were similarly higher for Pomona versus USC, but Oxtoby indicated those numbers included unauthorized use of golf carts that skewed the stats.
Similarly, Pomona's per-capita crimes against persons rate (murder, assault, sex offenses, robbery) was higher than USC's numbers for 2002-2004. For that period, Pomona had a total of 9 such crimes, or 6 per 1,000 students. At the same time, USC had a total of 84 crimes against persons incidents, or 2.6 per 1,000 students.
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