The Clery Act focuses on crimes that are formally reported to campus police or local law enforcement and that occur within specific geographical boundaries, such as on-campus housing or nearby public property. Because the vast majority of sexual assaults go unreported to law enforcement, and many occur in off-campus settings that fall outside Clery’s narrow definitions, the resulting data often represents only the tip of the iceberg.
A robust campus climate survey, by contrast, would capture "dark figure" data—incidents that students may never report through formal channels but are willing to disclose anonymously in a survey. Such surveys also gather more granular information about the "climate" of a campus, including student perceptions of how their institution handles reports and whether they feel safe in specific environments.
“Particularly in this current Title IX climate, we recognize that many students are either choosing not to report because there’s multiple barriers to entry or they may be seeking an alternative resolution process,” Vitchers said. She noted that without granular data, colleges cannot identify high-risk populations or tailor their prevention efforts to the specific needs of their student bodies.
An Understandable Delay or an Avoidable Failure?
The mandate for the national survey was originally tucked into the 2022 reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), which was signed into law as part of a massive omnibus budget bill. The legislation was specific in its requirements: the Department of Education was tasked with developing a standardized, secure online survey tool. Institutions receiving federal aid would then be required to administer this survey to a representative sample of students every two years.
The law stipulated that the survey must be confidential and protect student privacy while still collecting detailed demographic information to help identify trends. The first report based on this data was due to Congress in 2024, a deadline that has passed without a survey being launched.
Some experts, like Joseph Storch, who serves as general counsel at Excelsior University and has spent over a decade advocating for campus climate surveys, argue that the delay is symptomatic of a massive disconnect between legislative ambition and financial support. He compares the task to the work of the U.S. Census Bureau.
“The Census Bureau is funded in the billions to conduct that survey every 10 years,” Storch said. “The Department of Education has either zero funding or maybe some share of $1 million to conduct a survey of tens of millions of college students at thousands of institutions.”
Storch has attempted to track the progress of the survey through public records requests but reported receiving no substantive information in response. The Department of Education and the lawmakers who championed the original bill have similarly remained silent on the status of the project, leaving the higher education community in the dark.
