When thinking about campus crime, it’s easy to assume that the bigger the school, the bigger the problem – more students would naturally mean more incidents. However, recent data shows a startling truth. Within Western Massachusetts’s Five College Consortium, the school with the highest crime rate is not the city-like campus at UMass Amherst, but the seemingly bucolic Hampshire College – the consortium’s smallest.
According to the most recent 2023 Clery Reports, Hampshire College has a crime rate of about 46 incidents for every thousand students. This is over three times higher than the rate of UMass. Although UMass, with over thirty thousand students, reported almost five hundred crimes over the year, its crime rate was below 15 for every thousand students, the lowest in the Consortium.
Even though Hampshire only had 33 total reported crimes, the small student population of 716 means that despite this low number, their crime rate per capita is quite large. Amherst College and Mount Holyoke College also seemingly have high crime rates with about 32 and 35 incidents per thousand students respectively.
But does this mean that Hampshire College is an inherently dangerous campus, or is there something else at play?
With so few students, even a small number of reported crimes can inflate Hampshire’s crime rate. To compare, Mount Holyoke’s 82 reported crimes among its 2,300 students results in a lower (but still high) crime rate, while UMass’s hundreds of reported crimes doesn’t make a dent because of its population.
Another factor at play could be the inconsistency in reporting practices across campuses. Each school determines the way a crime is categorized or reported, and this can create a discrepancy between colleges. It is possible that Hampshire is more transparent in its reporting than bigger schools like UMass.
More likely, Hampshire’s high crime rate may highlight the statistical challenges of comparing schools of vastly different sizes and populations. Hampshire’s small population magnifies every reported incident, while UMass’s large student body means it can absorb the impact of a high number of crime reports, without it impacting their per capita rate too much.
Even though Hampshire College has the highest crime rate per capita out of the Five Colleges, a high crime rate doesn’t always indicate a higher risk of danger, just as a lower crime rate doesn’t always indicate security. According to Amherst Wire, “forcible sex offenses, burglary and aggravated assault to be the most prevalent on-campus crimes”, at UMass, while the most common crimes on Hampshire’s campus were smaller-scale, more petty-level offenses like liquor and drug law violations. Although Hampshire has a higher crime rate, it has a much lower number or “violent crime” infractions than UMass. This is a big deal in considering overall campus safety and the levels of danger students may be exposed to across campuses.
For students, parents, faculty, and staff, these numbers serve more as a reminder than anything else. That is, crime rates aren’t just about numbers, they’re about context. Understanding how schools collect and report crime data, as well as other environmental factors is vital to examining campus safety and making informed decisions.