Dangerous Colleges: Associations Between School-Level Factors and the Risk of Sexual Victimization of Female Students

College characteristics that may be associated with sexual victimization have become a salient topic in popular and scholarly discourse. However, very little research has formally tested these relationships. Utilizing the Online College Social Life Survey, a dataset that includes 22 schools and approximately 16,000 women respondents, a logit analysis is used to measure relationships between risk of different types of sexual victimization (namely, attempted physically forced intercourse, drug- and alcohol-facilitated sexual assault, physically forced intercourse, and unwanted sex because of verbal pressure) and student body size, school-level sex ratio, school selectivity, the type of school (public or private), and the percentage of students involved in Greek organizations on campus, all while controlling for individual-level characteristics and clustering standard errors at the school level. Each additional thousand students enrolled increases the odds of a physically forced rape by 2.47 times. The odds ratio for being a private institution ranges from .65 to .7, whereas percentage Greek shows opposing associations with individual-level Greek membership for physically forced rape. All other variables are statistically insignificant. These results suggest that institution-level factors play some role in the risk of sexual victimization; future research should expand on these findings.