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Will Campus Sexual-Assault Probes Affect Enrollment?

Will Campus Sexual-Assault Probes Affect Enrollment?

By Stephanie Haven, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Sixty-seven U.S. colleges are under federal investigation for their handling of sexual assault cases. And prospective students have started to take notice.

The past academic year marked a seismic shift. No longer were discussions of campus sexual assault confined to a handful of Northeastern colleges. From the University of California, Berkeley, to the Pennsylvania State University and from the University of Chicago to the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, students unleashed an army of activists on college administrators.

The White House took notice, creating a task force on campus rape. Congress took notice, promising legislation and hosting hearings where students testified. The Departments of Justice and Education took notice, restarting stagnant investigations.

“Schools are realizing that this is something that they have to stop (messing) up because it’s looking so bad for them,” said John Kelly, special projects coordinator at Know Your IX, a student rights organization focused on the federal law that bans gender discrimination on campus. “It’s not going to bode well.”

For colleges that had already been in the spotlight for mishandling sexual assault cases before this year, the national attention packed an extra punch.

“I have seen schools have demonstrable drops in enrollments when these kinds of situations end up in the newspaper when students say, ‘Our school isn’t being truthful about what crimes happen on our campus,'” said James Moore, the Education Department manager of the Jeanne Clery Act Compliance Team, which grew out of a federal law that requires colleges to report campus crime to the department. “The cover-up ends up hurting you more than the offense itself.”

College applicants select schools for myriad reasons. But does the handling of sexual assault by institutions of higher learning play a part in those decisions?

While admissions officers are careful not to point to it as the sole reason for the decline, applications to two elite colleges — Dartmouth and Amherst — fell by 14 percent and 8 percent, respectively, after recent high-publicity sexual assault cases on their campuses.

But one year’s numbers, though significant in these examples, don’t make a trend.

How the new national attention affects applicants’ decisions in the next admission cycle and beyond remains to be seen.

“If you have increased publicity about mismanagement, sexual assault, or whatever — if it’s in the paper year after year — it may have a snowball effect on application numbers,” said Tony Bankston, the dean of admissions at Illinois Wesleyan University and a member of the Admission Practices Committee of the National Association for College Admission Counseling.

Looked at as a consumer protection issue, “buyers” — prospective students and parents — have become more informed about sexual assault as an issue on college campuses. With that savvy has come increased demand for accountability, such as accurate data about the number of sexual assaults in a year and compliance with related federal law.

“The White House can issue different statements, Congress can legislate new laws, but at the end of the day it’s really going to be prospective students, current students, and alumni who keep up the pressure over time,” said Tracey Vitchers, the chair of the board of Students Active for Ending Rape, a student rights group. “That external pressure — when it comes to image, endowment size, and recruitment — is very important to the school.”

But sexual assault remains one of the most underreported crimes. Though the Clery Act requires colleges to report incidents of sexual assault, stark inconsistencies remain from school to school. More often than not, colleges with higher reported numbers of sexual assault reflect an environment where students feel comfortable coming forward, not necessarily a campus rife with sexual violence, according to the Department of Education.

“What you often find is schools with higher numbers have simply done more to find out what the truth is,” Moore said. “They’ve been more transparent about it or they’ve created a safer environment for people to come forward. And if you do that, people will let you know what’s going on.”

Photo: vkp_patel via flickr

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Colleges Lax On Campus Sexual Assault Cases, Senator Finds

Colleges Lax On Campus Sexual Assault Cases, Senator Finds

By Renee Schoof, McClatchy Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — An in-depth survey of American colleges and universities on sexual violence on campus found that many schools fall short in how they investigate and resolve such claims, Senator Claire McCaskill, who commissioned the survey, said Wednesday.

“There are some schools that are working hard to protect their students, but this shows there are way too many schools that are failing,” the Missouri Democrat said at a news conference.

McCaskill said that perhaps the most disturbing finding in the survey was that 41 percent of schools in a national sample of 350 schools said they hadn’t conducted a single investigation on sexual assaults in the past five years. By law, every case must be investigated, she said.

“When we know the prevalence of this problem, it is obviously a serious indictment that you have that many schools that have not investigated a single case,” McCaskill said.

A former sex crime prosecutor who in recent months has also taken on the issue of sexual assault in the military, McCaskill said the confidential survey was the largest, most comprehensive of its kind ever conducted. The Senate Subcommittee on Financial and Contracting Oversight, which she chairs, did the survey.

Some of the issues that emerged from the survey, which involved dozens of questions, included not taking steps that would encourage students to report sexual violence, such as letting the reports be kept confidential; lack of sexual assault training for students and faculty and staff; and lack of training for campus police in how to respond to reports of sexual violence.

The survey found that many schools did not take steps that would encourage students to report sexual violence, such as keeping the reports confidential. Schools also failed to provide training for students, faculty and staff on how to respond to reports of sexual assault.

Among other findings:

    1. 43 percent of the nation’s largest public universities allow students to help adjudicate rape claims, which McCaskill said was a bad practice. In a criminal court, members of a jury can’t know the defendant, which she said was not the case in campus sex crimes adjudications.
    2. 30 percent of campus law enforcement officials in a national sample of 350 schools received no training on how to respond to reports of sexual violence.
    3. 22 percent of schools in the sample allow athletic departments to oversee sexual violence cases involving student athletes. “You cannot expect the athletic department, which is in charge of giving scholarships, or depends on the athletic prowess of young men or women, that they will be fair, or at least have the appearance of being fair,” McCaskill said.
    4. 51 percent of institutions had a hotline for students who have been raped and 44 percent provided the option of reporting sexual assaults online. About 8 percent of institutions do not allow confidential reporting.

The national sample was made up of 350 schools that represented large and small, public and private, and for-profit and nonprofit institutions. McCaskill’s staff received responses from 236 of these schools. She said the survey was statistically valid.

Additionally, her staff also surveyed the 50 largest public four-year institutions and the 40 largest private nonprofit four-year schools.

The survey report said that campus sexual assaults are under-reported, citing a Department of Justice report that said fewer than 5 percent of college rape victims report the attack to law enforcement.

One of the best ways to get a reading on sexual assault issues on a campus is to take confidential student surveys, McCaskill said, but only 16 percent of schools did so, according to the survey.

“If we’re going to get a portrait of whether students feel safe,” she said, “wouldn’t it be a good idea if we asked them?”

Photo: Vkp_patel via Flickr