UltraViolet, a national women’s rights group, is fighting to include sexual assault statistics in the Princeton Review college rankings.
The Princeton Review provides rankings annually based on surveys from college students, and UltraViolet is now pressuring the organization to include sexual assault-related questions in their surveys.
“The fact that The Princeton Review thinks it’s important to study things like the party scene on a campus or the quality of food in a dining hall … but they don’t think it’s important to ask students how bad the situation is with sexual assault or how good they think their university is at handling these issues – that’s just not acceptable,” says UltraViolet’s organizing director Karin Roland.
The group launched an online petition, which already has more than 35,000 signatures, and also created a series of online ads. The petition reads,
Countless high school seniors and their parents consult the Princeton Review school rankings each year. It grades schools on everything from quality of life to class size to fire safety, but it includes nothing about sexual assault. If the Princeton Review starts including information on campuses’ sexual assault track records, the public statistics will motivate colleges across the country to get serious about the epidemic of campus rape.
Although officials at the Princeton Review agree that sexual assault on college campuses is an important issue, they don’t believe that there is enough accurate information available to create school-to-school comparisons. However, UltraViolet continues to fight to make this type of information available to students.
“Our members won’t stop the pressure until the Princeton Review does the right thing,” says Roland. “As long as the school doesn’t provide that information, the Princeton Review is helping schools hide from the reality.”