To Adiel Kaplan and the editorial staff of the Review,

I am disappointed. I fully support investigation and dialogue centered around Oberlin and other school’s records on sexual offense policies, but I have some serious reservations about the analysis done in the article, “Oberlin 3rd Highest in Reported Sexual Offenses Among Similar Schools,” by Adiel Kaplan [November 8, 2012]. This article had the potential to address an important issue, but sadly Kaplan applied poor data analysis techniques that resulted in terrible reporting.

Kaplan’s article begins by placing Oberlin “among the nation’s top 25 private liberal arts colleges.” As of November 12, 2012, Newsweek (the ranking source used in the original article) has Oberlin listed as #26. Kaplan’s comparison placing us in the top 25 schools is at best lazy reporting, and at worst dishonest. There are numerous ways in which she could have done a similar study without having misrepresented Oberlin’s rank. For example, she could have compared Oberlin’s statistics with those of the top 50 liberal arts colleges, rather than the top 25, placing Oberlin squarely in the middle of the sample.

My greatest concern regarding Kaplan’s manipulation of the data was that she did not control for the student body size among the schools she investigated. As Oberlin was the largest of the schools compared, and nearly four times the size of the smallest school, one would expect that, all other things equal, it would have more reported sexual offenses than the other schools on Kaplan’s list. Kaplan’s analysis would have been more meaningful if she had showed reported cases per capita, or per thousand students, thus controlling for differences in student populations. That she did not do so suggests that she was more concerned with a snappy headline than credible journalism.

Using all the same sources as Kaplan,* and ordering the top 26 schools by number of incidences of sexual offenses per 1000 students instead of number of total offenses uncontrolled for size, Oberlin is number 7, not 3 as Kaplan claims. If you do the same thing with the top 50 schools Oberlin is number 14. Without controlling for the size of the student population, the data Kaplan presents is meaningless.

Finally, I wish to challenge Kaplan’s assertion that if the study were to include Oberlin’s own crime reports statistics, Oberlin would be ranked even higher. Given that there is a discrepancy between Oberlin’s self-reported statistics and the numbers given by the Department of Education, it is likely that other schools could have similar discrepancies. Conflating these sets of statistics is meaningless.

I hope to see a higher standard of articles in the future from The Review.

Sincerely,

Lucy Gelb

Oberlin 2012

• This does not take into account the three military schools included in the rankings, for which offense data was not readily available from Kaplan’s source.

Editors Note: The Review also published a response to the above letter titled, “Staff Box: On Sexual Assault Data” available below. The response was authored by News Editors Julia Herbst and Robin Wasserman as well as Staff Writer Adiel Kaplan.  

We are writing to set the record straight in response to a letter to the editors regarding the article “Oberlin Third Highest in Reported Sexual Offense Among Similar Schools,” (The Oberlin Review, Nov.9, 2012) which included several false allegations about the story. The letter to the editors, written by Lucy Gelb OC ’12 in the Nov.16 edition, makes various assertions which stem from misinterpretations of the article and a lack of knowledge of the full scope of the Review’s research for this story.

Here is a more detailed explanation of our reporting process on these counts:

• The statistical analysis which ranked Oberlin third highest among 25 similar schools used the U.S. News college rankings to obtain a list of the nation’s top private liberal arts colleges. Gelb mistakenly asserts that the article erred by including Oberlin, as the school is tied for 26^th on the U.S. News website. She failed to account for the fact that the U.S. News list of liberal arts colleges includes publicly funded U.S. military institutions, such as the U.S. Naval Academy and the U.S. Military Academy, which are both ranked above Oberlin. When public institutions are removed, Oberlin is tied for 24th.
• Gelb challenges the fact that Oberlin would be ranked second instead of third in number of reported sexual offenses when additional numbers from Oberlin’s own report not included in the national database were added to the tally. She argues that other schools might also have higher self-reported statistics. Prior to publication the Review checked reports from each school ranked among the top 10 and found that Oberlin was the only school among them which reported more incidents in its campus crime report than the national database.
• Gelb also challenges the fact that the data in the analysis was not adjusted for size (as was stated in the article). This was an editorial decision made by the Review prior to publication, after an analysis of the data both adjusted and unadjusted for size. Accounting for size tends to have more significance when comparing a small school like Oberlin to a much larger university. For example, Arizona State University and the University of Texas at Austin reported about the same number of assaults as Oberlin (22 and 24 respectively compared to Oberlin’s 21), yet they are roughly 20 times its size. Although it is true that Oberlin was the largest of the schools in the Review’s analysis, the range in size of the popularly referenced U.S. News list is relatively minor (500 to 5,000 students). Even when looked at on a per capita basis, Oberlin ranks 7^th in sexual assaults among the leading 25 private liberal arts colleges – still in the top third for number of reports.

The letter seemed to ignore the larger points of the article: the campus sexual offense policy processes are fraught with problems, that sexual offense policies, including on our own campus, are attracting controversy, that underreporting is a rampant problem, and that Oberlin has a high rate of reported incidents among top liberal arts schools. It is our hope that the Review’s reporting sparks dialogue on campus not about the smaller details of a data analysis, but about the more important issues surrounding sexual offense policies on campus.