A Comparison of Four Different Measures of Sexual Assault at Colleges and Universities in the United States

The Clery Act collects statistics on campus crimes, including sexual assaults, from 11,307 higher-education institutions in the United States. These data underrepresent the number of sexual assaults because so few are reported to campus authorities. To assess the usefulness of Clery Act data, I compared regression analyses on four different measures of sexual assaults. Using Clery Act data, I calculated the sexual assault rate per 10,000 students (SAR10K) from 2014 to 2019. Second, I analyzed the number of sexual assaults reported on climate surveys at 201 institutions. Next, I created estimates of the sexual assault reporting ratio (SARR) for 939 colleges and universities, the first based on the widely cited estimate of how many women are sexually assaulted in college—1 in 5—and the second based on a recent estimate from a larger number of universities (17 percent). Finally, I used 13 variables to predict SAR10K for 939 schools, the campus climate survey measure for 201 institutions with data available on their websites, and both SARR estimates for 918.

Nine of 10 significant predictors of SAR10K predicted both SARR estimates. The standardized coefficients were in the same direction and often of the same magnitude. The percent of first-year students living in dormitories predicted SAR10K but not either SARR estimates, suggesting that differences in the number of sexual assaults reported under the Clery Act were not merely a function of differences in reporting. Students attending residential colleges tended to report sexual assaults at a higher rate than students attending commuter campuses. The programs at residential colleges and universities may be more successful in encouraging reporting and preventing assaulting. The administrative data produced by the Clery Act and the data collected through climate surveys largely tell the same story about sexual assault on college and university campuses in the United States.