Motor Vehicle Theft on campus

The peak year for motor vehicle theft reporting was 2024 with 12,588 incidents. An average of 996 institutions recorded at least one such incident each year across the reporting window. The single institution with the most reported motor vehicle theft incidents in 2024 is University of California-San Diego in La Jolla, CA with 444 incidents (4% of the national total). 4,612 of the 5,585 surveyed institutions (82.6%) recorded no motor vehicle theft at all in 2024, so a zero is the ordinary case for this offence rather than a distinguishing result. With roughly 83 campuses in every hundred reporting none, a zero here carries almost no information about a specific institution; the more telling comparison is against similarly sized campuses that did report, further down this page.

Within criminal offenses reported in 2024, motor vehicle theft is the 1st most-reported of 11 offences, at 37.9% of the group's 33,224 incidents. Reporting is widely distributed: the single highest-reporting institution accounts for 4% of the 2024 national total, so no one campus drives this figure. No campus accounts for more than 4% of the 2024 total, so the order below tracks institution size as much as anything else: these are raw incident counts, not per-student rates, and a large university can lead the table without being less safe than a small one.