Campus Safety by State
Each U.S. state presents a different campus safety landscape, shaped by the mix of public and private institutions, urban vs rural settings, and state-level enforcement and reporting practices. Use this directory to dive into the Clery Act profile of any state and compare its colleges side by side.
How state-level data is organized
We aggregate Clery Act campus safety statistics for every institution participating in the federal financial-aid system, then group them by state for at-a-glance comparison. Each state page lists every reporting institution, its national rank, and its safety score (on-campus incidents per 1,000 enrolled students).
Why state matters: state laws governing alcohol, weapons, and reporting can affect what counts as a Clery incident. The U.S. Department of Education enforces a uniform federal definition through the Office of Postsecondary Education Campus Safety Survey, but state-level policy differences still drive measurable variation in raw counts.
For neighborhood context beyond the campus boundary, cross-reference with city-level FBI UCR/NIBRS data at PlainCrime — campus statistics measure only what happens on and immediately around the institution's owned property.
What you can do here
Click any state above to see the full list of institutions ranked by safety score, with crime category breakdowns. Use our rankings hub to compare the safest campuses nationwide, or the specific incident-type pages to understand burglary, drug-violation, liquor-violation, and VAWA-offense patterns across the country.
PlainCampus is editorially independent. We do not accept payment for ranking placement; institutions cannot purchase removal of incidents from the public Clery data we surface. We publish methodology and source attribution on every page so readers can audit our work.