Why People Should Know Math

When you know math you can tell when your politicians are lying to you and pandering to others who aren’t as smart as you are:

Team Obama is now aggressively targeting campus sexual assaults with a new White House Task Force led by Joe Biden, see news reports from the Washington Post, the LA Times and NPR. Unfortunately, it’s another White House effort with good intentions – to help women (and get their votes) – but is a campaign that is based on inaccurate, misleading and false data about the frequency of campus sexual assaults...

But there’s a big problem here. Taken together, those two claims above from the White House, if both are accurate, mean that nowhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college...

So let’s do some math using actual crime statistics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the four years from 2009-2012 (summarized in the table above) and the White House’s under-reporting assumption of 12%. Over that four year period, there were 137 reports of sexual assault on the Madison campus, in university residence halls, on nearby non-campus property, and on public property adjacent to campus. We’ll assume that 100% of the sexual assaults victims were female. Using the White House claim that only 12% of sexual assaults get reported, there would have been slightly more than 1,000 unreported sexual assaults at UW during that period, bringing the total number of sexual assaults (reported + unreported) to 1,141 (see table).

The University of Wisconsin-Madison has a student body of 43,275 students, of which 51.6% are female. Dividing the 1,141 sexual assaults over a four-year period by the 22,329 UW female students would mean that only 5.1% UW women (or about 1 in 20) would be sexually assaulted while in college. Certainly that’s still too high, but nowhere close to the White House claim of one in five female students being assaulted while in college.

An analysis of crime data from the University of Michigan shows a similar 1-in-18.5 chance (5.4%) of a female student being a victim of sexual assault during four years in Ann Arbor. At the University of California-Berkeley, crime data suggest that the chances over four years of a female student being sexually assaulted are only 3.1%, or one in 32 women. Do the math yourself (and share with me if possible) with crime statistics from any other college campus, along with the White House under-reporting assumption of 12%, and I’m confident that there’s no college campus in America where anywhere near 1 in 5 women are sexually assaulted while in college.

What possible reason could the president have for repeatedly offering such bogus numbers?  And why would any woman go to college if there truly were a 1 in 5 chance of such an attack?

I guess if you repeat a lie often enough and loudly enough...