Part 3- What's Happening on Campus: It’s One Big Club: Putting a Face and a Number on the Ivy League

Collage Safety Resource
Written By Larry Betz

It's One Big Club, and Most Families Can't Get In the Door

Before we ever get to a single crime statistic, I want to start with a harder question: who actually gets to attend these schools in the first place?

Because here's what the research shows, and this isn't speculation, it's peer-reviewed economic data from Harvard economist Raj Chetty and the Opportunity Insights team, the same research the New York Times built its well-known 2017 analysis around. At several Ivy League schools, including Brown, Princeton, Yale, and Dartmouth, there are literally more students enrolled from families in the top 1 percent of income, roughly $630,000 a year or more, than there are from the entire bottom 60 percent of American families combined. Not the bottom 10 percent. The bottom 60.

The same research found something even more specific: a student from a top 1 percent family is twice as likely to get into an Ivy-Plus school as a middle-class student with the exact same SAT or ACT score. Two-thirds of that gap isn't explained by wealthy families applying more or choosing to attend at higher rates. It's the school itself admitting the wealthier student at a higher rate for the identical academic profile. The researchers point to three specific levers driving it: legacy preference for children of alumni, "non-academic" personal ratings that quietly favor students from expensive private schools, and athletic recruiting, which skews wealthy because sports like rowing, fencing, squash, and sailing require money and access most families simply don't have.

Legacy admissions alone tell the story on their own. All eight Ivy League schools still consider legacy status in admissions today. Harvard has the clearest documented number, pulled directly from court records in the Students for Fair Admissions lawsuit: legacy applicants were admitted at 33.6 percent, compared to 5.9 percent for everyone else. That's a nearly six-times advantage, before you even factor in test scores or activities. That same court case showed that recruited athletes, legacy applicants, children on the dean's or director's interest list, and children of faculty and staff, a group known collectively as ALDC, made up roughly 30 percent of Harvard's entire admitted class. At Princeton, legacy admits alone run somewhere around 10 to 15 percent of every incoming class, year after year.

And then there's the raw math of just getting in the door at all. This past admissions cycle, acceptance rates across the eight Ivy League schools ranged from roughly 3.7 percent at Harvard up to about 6.9 percent at Cornell. That means somewhere between 93 and 96 out of every 100 applicants, valedictorians, athletes, published researchers, kids who did everything right, were turned away. And the small sliver who get in are disproportionately the ones whose parents already went there, already write checks to the endowment, or already play a sport that requires a boathouse their public high school never had.

I'm laying this out first, before a single fraternity name or crime statistic, because it matters for everything that follows. These are, quite literally, some of the most exclusive private clubs in the country, dressed up as universities. And once you understand who actually gets a seat inside that club, and how much of it comes down to family money and family history rather than merit alone, the rest of what you're about to read, how these same institutions have handled sexual assault, hazing, and discipline inside their own walls, starts to make a lot more sense. It's not a coincidence that a system built to protect insiders when it comes to who gets in has also, in case after case, protected insiders when something goes wrong once they're there.

Now Let's Put a Number on What's Actually Happening Inside

Everything below comes directly from each university's own federally required Annual Security Report, the document every school has to publish under the Jeanne Clery Act that we walked through in Part 2. These aren't estimates, and they aren't secondhand summaries. I pulled the actual reported on-campus rape and fondling numbers, for the three most recent years available, straight from each school's own primary-source report. Cost figures are each school's most recently published total cost of attendance, tuition, room, board, and fees combined.

Cornell University Cost of attendance: $83,196 On-campus rape reports: 2024: 23 | 2023: 28 | 2022: 25 On-campus fondling reports: 2024: 21 | 2023: 22 | 2022: 24 Hazing: Cornell's own public hazing violations page lists six separate student organizations found responsible for hazing violations in the spring 2026 semester alone: Alpha Kappa Psi, Delta Sigma Pi, the Men's Lacrosse team, Men's Lightweight Rowing, Phi Delta Theta, and Zeta Psi. Cornell's published hazing record goes back to 2004.

Harvard University Cost of attendance: $86,926 On-campus rape reports: 2024: 7 | 2023: 17 | 2022: 16

Yale University Cost of attendance: $87,150 On-campus rape reports: 2024: 13 | 2023: 53 | 2022: 40 On-campus fondling reports: 2024: 11 | 2023: 16 | 2022: 9

University of Pennsylvania Cost of attendance: $91,112 On-campus rape reports: 2024: 3 | 2023: 2 | 2022: 3 On-campus fondling reports: 2024: 8 | 2023: 2 | 2022: 0 Hazing: Penn's January 2026 Hazing Transparency Report found two organizations in violation. Alpha Iota Gamma, cited for zip-tying pledges together, forcing champagne bottle consumption, forcingpledges to carry raw eggs, and public ridicule of pledges. And an unrecognized organization calling itself the "Lotus Society," cited for mandatory midnight-to-8-a.m. activities and initiation demands exceeding 10 hours a week.

Princeton University Cost of attendance: $94,624 On-campus sex offenses reported (Princeton's most recent public report combines rape and fondling into one category rather than breaking them out separately): 2023: 7 | 2022: 10 | 2021: 15 Worth noting: Princeton's own reporting separately disclosed 35 additional reports made to confidential campus counselors in 2023 that do not appear anywhere in the official Clery numbers above, because a confidential report is not the same as an official one.

Brown University Cost of attendance: $97,016 On-campus rape reports: 2024: 10 | 2023: 20 | 2022: 21 On-campus fondling reports: 2024: 2 | 2023: 12 | 2022: 11

We're still finishing verification on Dartmouth and Columbia's most current numbers directly from their own reports, and we'll fold those in as soon as that's confirmed. But six schools in, the pattern is already impossible to ignore: some of the most expensive, most selective, most prestigious institutions in the country, the same ones that filter out over 90 percent of everyone who applies, are also reporting dozens of on-campus rapes and fondling incidents every single year, inside a system we already know significantly under-reports what's actually happening, for the exact reasons we covered in Part 2.

And before you read a single one of those school-by-school numbers as the full picture, go back to what we actually proved in Part 2. Every rape and fondling figure listed above is only what got officially reported, and Cornell's own climate survey showed that number is nowhere close to what students actually said happened to them. Twenty-three reported rapes in 2024 sits next to roughly 2,020 Cornell women who told the university's own anonymous survey they'd experienced some form of sexual assault during their time on campus, out of an undergraduate population of about 16,100. That's not a Cornell-specific problem. There's no reason to think Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, or Brown's actual numbers look any different from their official ones than Cornell's do. So every single figure in this section should be read as a floor, not a ceiling, the smallest possible version of what's actually happening on each of these campuses, not the real total.

The Bottom Line

Ninety-five out of a hundred kids never get through the door. The small number who do are paying close to six figures a year for the privilege. And once inside, the same institutions that spent months deciding who was worthy enough to admit have, in report after report, struggled to consistently protect the students they let in. That's not an accusation against any one school. It's a pattern, backed by the schools' own numbers, and it's exactly the kind of pattern a parent deserves to see clearly before move-in day, not after.

Sources

Prepared, Not Paranoid. Protecting the Most Vulnerable Among Us.

Larry Betz https://www.sedonastrengthandmobility.com
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Part 2- What's Happening on Campus: Why Reporting Is So Hard, and the Federal Law That Forces Schools to Tell You Anyway
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Part 4- What's Happening on Campus: Who Campus Police Actually Work For