State College has always ranked high on safe towns lists, but this year Penn State was recognized by The Daily Beast as the second safest university in the Big Ten.

The website created rankings based on 2006-2008 crime data from the U.S. Department of Education, FBI, and Secret Service. The study looked not only at convictions, but also at reported crimes. They considered statistics for burglary, car theft, assault, robbery, arson, negligent homicide, and murder. The researchers created a weighted average of the crimes (for example, murder was considered 40 times more dangerous than burglary) and then divided the total by the number of students at that campus, to make large and mid-size universities comparable.

University of Michigan ranked as the most dangerous Big Ten campus, and 22nd overall (out of 458 schools). The University had almost four times the rapes of Penn State, six times the robberies, 11 times the assaults, and nearly eight times the car thefts. However, the schools did have a similar amount of burglaries and arsons. Indiana University took the top spot as the safest campus, with stats very similar to PSU.

Pennsylvania State University
University Park, Pennsylvania

Total enrollment: 45,185

Criminal Incidents (most recent 3 calendar years):
Murders: 0
Negligent Homicides: 0
Forcible Rapes: 31
Non-forcible Rapes: 0
Robberies: 13
Aggravated Assaults: 20
Burglaries: 243
Car Thefts: 18
Arsons: 21