Wash. U. Is the Fifth-Most Dangerous College, According to Aspirational Website

Elite Daily bills itself as "The premier online destination for aspiring men and women of Generation-Y," which explains why I'd never heard of it. (I'm far too old and not nearly as aspirational as I used to be.) These young go-getters made a list of "The Most Dangerous Colleges To Go To," and our town's Washington University showed up at number five.

The photo to the right is the image Elite Daily selected to illustrate the dangerous Washington University. It appears to be a veritable viper's nest of sin and human misery, don't it?

No methodology for their rankings are given (aspirational gen-Y'ers are all about the good life, not good research practices), but the unattributed piece does include a list of crime statistics for the past three years for each school. I guess if you crunch all those numbers and come up with a per capita figure you might be able to prove that Rutgers (number 7 on the list, with 1 murder/28 rapes/24 aggravated assaults per 11,501 students) is more dangerous than Harvard (number 8 on the list, with 1 murder/128 rapes/170 aggravated assaults per 27,561 students), as Elite Daily attests.  Except that you're statistically twice as likely to be raped and three times as likely to be assaulted at Harvard than at Rutgers.

Wash. U.'s per capita figures (extrapolated from the school's 1 murder/22 rapes/30 assaults per 13,575 students) put them lower than both Harvard and Rutgers in terms of rape and assault, statistically speaking. And yet Wash. U. ranks higher than the number one school, University of Pennsylvania (4 murders/27 rapes/40 assaults per 24,599 students), in both of those categories.

Anyway, you don't go to Elite Daily for number-crunching. You go for the insipid motivational quotes ("Excellence is not a skill. It's an attitude." Thanks, Ralph Marston.) and the pictures of half-dressed women. Or maybe it's the Boating and Yachts category that brings 'em in. Who knows?