10 Things Campus Security Won't Tell You

The first step: allocating more money to campus security. According to Harper College police chief Mike Alsup, colleges tend to earmark about 1.5% of their budget for security. "It's the lowest priority for funding, based on the school budgets I've seen," says S. Daniel Carter, VP of Security on Campus, a nonprofit that focuses on crime prevention and victim assistance. Colleges' primary concern is educating students, Carter explains; if money's tight, "they're going to cut the campus police officer, not the professor." Scott Jaschik, cofounder of InsideHigherEd.com, agrees: "There are no Nobel Prizes for safe campuses."

One major problem is schools' failing to provide "timely warning" about crimes that could threaten campus safety. A recent example: After Eastern Michigan University student Laura Dickinson was found dead in her room last December, the university said there was no reason to suspect foul play — until police later arrested a fellow student for her rape and murder. Turns out top school officials had covered up a grisly crime investigation. In July university president John Fallon was fired. (An EMU spokesperson could not comment before press time.)

Outside Georgia, private schools are another matter. In Massachusetts, for example, incident reports don't have to be open even to students. The state Supreme Court ruled as much last year, after student newspaper The Harvard Crimson sued the university police department to provide incident reports on alleged sexual assaults and other crimes. The court reasoned that because Harvard is private, it doesn't have to play by public rules. This is also why private-college crime logs are not as detailed as police logs — "they don't have to put who," according to Mike Hiestand, legal consultant for Student Press Law Center.

For their part, most colleges do provide a cursory safety talk during orientation, but they feel there's not much else they can do to protect students who live on their own. What makes life outside the confines of campus so dangerous? Not surprisingly, the majority of off-campus incidents occur between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m., with half the victims reporting they were engaged in "leisure activity" at the time. Translation? "If you're out late at night and three sheets to the wind, you're an easy mark," says Bath, from Security on Campus.

John McNall, president of BowMac Educational Services, agrees. Administrators have realized for a long time that they need to upgrade emergency plans, McNall says; the Virginia Tech shootings were certainly another "'it can happen here' wake-up call." Christopher Blake, associate director at the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators, adds that developing better mass-notification systems via text-messaging is job one. Indeed, by the time Virginia Tech police had emailed students that a gunman was on the loose, many were already in class.