Editorial & Corrections Policy

How pages are produced

PlainCampus's school, state, and ranking pages are generated from public federal datasets: the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Postsecondary Education Campus Safety and Security Survey — the official Clery Act crime and fire-safety disclosures every Title IV institution must file — combined with enrollment counts from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). We load each source into a structured database, join crime and fire statistics to the right institution by its federal UnitID, and render every page from that database. The counts you see — burglaries, motor-vehicle thefts, VAWA offenses, fire incidents, and the rest — are reproduced from the official filings, not hand-typed and not estimated by us.

This is a data-publishing model: the same template renders thousands of pages so that all 5,673 tracked institutions are covered consistently. We are transparent that these data pages are produced programmatically from the source filings rather than written individually. The editorial work goes into the pipeline (how data is sourced, joined, normalized, and computed), the methodology, and the written guides — not into hand-authoring thousands of near-identical school pages, which would add no accuracy and invite inconsistency.

Sourcing standards

• Primary sources only. Every crime and fire figure traces to the Department of Education's Clery Act survey; enrollment traces to IPEDS. We do not republish third-party aggregators or scraped totals.
• Attribution in context. Each data page names its source dataset and the reporting year near the figures, and links to the methodology that explains how each measure is defined.
• Reported incidents are not the same as crime that occurred. The Clery Act counts incidents reported within defined campus geography. A higher count can reflect a stronger reporting culture rather than a more dangerous campus — our methodology and the Clery Act guide document this directly.
• Derived values are labeled. The per-1,000-student safety score, national and state ranks, and aggregates are presented as our analysis of the underlying filings, distinct from the raw counts as filed.
• No invented data. Where an institution reports zero incidents we show zero (a real disclosure), not a blank; where enrollment is too small for a stable rate we say so rather than implying false precision, and exclude those outliers from ranked lists.

Update cadence

The Department of Education releases new Campus Safety and Security Survey data annually, typically several months after the reporting period closes, so campus crime statistics carry a one-to-two-year lag by design. We refresh our database when new federal data is published, recompute the affected safety scores and rankings, and show the reporting year on every data page. Because the underlying records are official annual filings, figures are stable between refreshes; the reporting year shown on each page tells you which release a page is based on.

Corrections process

If a figure on PlainCampus looks wrong, please tell us. Because our pages are generated from federal filings, a genuine error almost always traces back to either the source data or our processing of it — so this is how we handle a report:

1. Report. Email us through the contact page with the page URL and the number that looks off.
2. Verify. We compare the figure against the official Campus Safety and Security Survey record for that institution and reporting year.
3. Fix at the source. If the value is wrong on our side — most often a join or normalization issue — we correct it in the database and pipeline that generate the page, not just on the single page, so every affected page is fixed at once. If the figure faithfully reflects the official filing, we explain that and, where useful, add context.
4. Note it. Material corrections that change a published figure are reflected the next time the page rebuilds, with the reporting year shown so you can see which release a page is based on.

We aim to acknowledge data-error reports within a few business days.

Editorial independence

PlainCampus is an independent publisher and is not affiliated with the U.S. Department of Education, any college or university, or any government agency. We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from any institution we cover. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising; advertisers do not influence which schools we cover or how we present their data. Our rankings are computed mechanically from the filings, so no institution can pay to move up — or down — a list.

Appropriate use

PlainCampus is for informational purposes only and does not constitute safety, security, legal, or enrollment advice. The data describes reported on-campus activity as filed under the Clery Act; it is not a complete picture of safety at any campus, and it cannot predict any individual student's experience. See our disclaimer for details before drawing conclusions about any school.