Actually, the survey is flawed.
All of the questions are things like "do the dorms have an attendant", "do the dorms have self-closing self-locking doors", "do you have to show ID to get into campus building", "are there blue-light phones and cameras" in parking lots and all over campus, and "how many police do you have". The top ten of their "safest" campus list is filled with schools in Baltimore, Boston, New York, and Chicago. Of course campuses in urban areas that are in many cases not safe will score better on those questions. They have security buildings and more police because they need them -- we don't. They only looked at safety measures, not crime statistics.
Actually, that's not true. According to their "Methodology" PDF, they did ask for crime statistics in a number of categories. They plugged those numbers into a mathematical formula that weighted serious crimes more heavily. However, I see no report containing those final numbers, nor what exactly those numbers would mean. The report is still a load of poorly-designed crap, but they do take actual crime rate into account, on some level.
Unless they have some insane definition of "attendant", 100% of ISU's residence halls have staff members available 24/7. There is ALWAYS someone on call in every single building. Community Advisors that are on-duty are required to stay in the building, and can be anywhere within a couple of minutes.
I have quite a lot of interaction with campus life units at ISU, especially the Department of Residence and the Office of New Student Programs. We intentionally do not have sessions during Orientation covering binge drinking, drug use, or rape. There are multiple campus units that have extremely capable professionals that can help students with each one, and incoming students are given information on who to contact and how if there is a problem or if they want to read the University's guidelines. We do not have separate presentations on these three topics, so the questionnaire made us answer 'No', despite the fact that we do provide the information elsewhere. The other campus units all conduct regular presentations on the respective topics, open to all students- not just new students. They are also 'on-call' to do the same presentations for any group or individual that requests it. The other, smaller reason we don't include these topics as fully separate presentations is because of Iowa State's unique approach to orientation. Our Orientations in June are much shorter affairs than most schools have. They are less than two days long, and are not only for the incoming student but also for the families. This is a basic introduction to campus and the school, appropriate for everyone who comes along. There are many more student-focused activities and sessions during Destination Iowa State, in the week before classes begin in August. Between the high number of trained professionals, the orientation/DIS arrangement, the low incidence of rape on campus, and the low incidence of hard drug use or binge drinking among freshmen, there is no need for us to spend valuable time covering those topics when they will hear about them elsewhere.
I'm irked that they put so much weight on needing to show your ID in order to even enter the library. I'd never even heard of that before this survey. It might be great for a school in the middle of a high-crime ghetto, but it's an absolutely ridiculous proposition for schools like ours. Any crime that happens in Parks is being committed by students anyway, so that bizarre policy wouldn't help anything.
This is a stupid questionnaire that I'm disappointed the University even bothered responding to.
