It’s often said that there’s safety in numbers, but now that saying is more applicable to students than ever before. The U.S. Department of Education has recently unveiled a web site that students and parents can use in order to judge the safety of any of over 6,700 prospective colleges and universities in the nation.

The Office of Post Secondary Education’s campus security statistics web site is located at http://ope.ed.gov/security/Search.asp. On it, students and parents can view the number of criminal offenses such as burglaries or motor vehicle thefts, hate crimes and arrests recorded since 1997. This extensive database can be searched by geographic region, state, city, the type of institution, the program a student may be interested in and the name of the institution.

The Department of Education created this website on the heels of a congressional amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965, giving attending and potential students the opportunity to research criminal offenses on a college campus. The original law only required that campus security to compile an annual report of campus crime with no provision for bringing these statistics into the public sector. With the advent of the Internet, however, and advanced database searching technology, it’s become easier for students to take an active roll in their safety while at school.

In addition to the amended law, schools are also required to report all crimes in a timely manner to campus security, authorities and local police agencies. This would be done to hopefully to find a solution in order to prevent any similar crimes from happening again, or the same crime reoccurring. Campuses around the nation were required to submit a current statistical list on Oct. 24. Any campuses that missed this date or failed to report crimes to local authorities could end up paying a fine of up to $25,000.

The importance of reporting the incidence of crime to local authorities made clear by an incident that happened at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, PA in 1986. That year, 19-year-old Jeanne Clery was murdered by fellow student Joseph Henry. He entered her dorm room by placing empty pizza boxes in the security door to keep it open. It was later found that over 38 crimes had gone unreported only three years before her death.