The Federal Bureau of Investigation [http://www.fbi.gov] issues an annual study called "Uniform Crime Reports: Crime in the United States"  [http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ucr.htm]. With computer-assisted reporting techniques, you can analyze crime data and see how your college or university compares with other schools. To do that, you must calculate crime rates – the number of crimes per 1,000 students.

In Chapter 3 of NRW Plus, you will find a demonstration called "Campus Larceny." That demonstration explains how to download an Excel spreadsheet of college crime data from the FBI. The data will look like this:

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0073511935/535052/Campus_Crime_p1.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (75.0K)</a>

If we want to compare the schools' property crime rates, we must create a new column that shows the number of property crimes per 1,000 students. We create that formula for the first school:

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0073511935/535052/Campus_Crime_p2.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (58.0K)</a>

Then we copy that formula down the column to all the other schools:

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0073511935/535052/Campus_Crime_p3.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (114.0K)</a>

Then we can sort the schools to see which had the highest property crime rates. You also may want to filter the schools – to compare only schools with 10,000 or more students, for example. In that case, the results would look like this:

<a onClick="window.open('/olcweb/cgi/pluginpop.cgi?it=jpg::::/sites/dl/free/0073511935/535052/Image1.jpg','popWin', 'width=NaN,height=NaN,resizable,scrollbars');" href="#"><img valign="absmiddle" height="16" width="16" border="0" src="/olcweb/styles/shared/linkicons/image.gif"> (178.0K)</a>

Without much trouble, you could do a similar comparison of all colleges and universities in your state.