colleges have the same rate of rape as prisons – about 20%. what kind of horrible, abusive parent would put their daughter through a place where she has a 20% chance of being raped? anyone who tries to send their daughter to college should have all their children taken away.
and that’s assuming there’s no gay rape. i’m sure it’s just that the new york times isn’t woke enough to tell us about it yet.
College-age women who don’t attend college are 30% more likely to be sexually assaulted than women who are in college.
(I know, the link is to the New York Times. I tried to read the actual journal article but it was paywalled. But like, all they did was run the numbers on NCVS data, plus it fits with my priors anyway.)
Obviously this is as far as possible from evidence of causality. I don’t know of any good studies attempting to do causal inference here; I wouldn’t be surprised if an economist could come up with a clever instrumental variable.
(though that study would by necessity tell us about the effects on people who were marginal to go to college, and I’m not sure how much that would tell me about the effects on e.g. my children)
Anyway I think refusing to pay for your children to go to college is a questionably effective and quite costly intervention–if I were into non-evidence-based ways to reduce my children’s risk of getting raped I would probably go with teaching them to drink responsibly, teaching them about buddy systems, teaching them about consent, etc.
(also I’ll note that college students are adults? if my parents had refused to pay for me to go to college, I would have gone to college anyway. this is dependent on class privilege in many ways but still)