School Shootings Are Changing How Students Choose Colleges

Less than 24 hours after a graduate student took to the halls of UNC-Chapel Hill and fatally shot a faculty member, the college newspaper memorialized the day with a long list of heartbreaking texts.

"ARE YOU SAFE? WHERE ARE YOU? ARE YOU ALONE?" The Daily Tar Heel's front page read, reflecting thousands of messages to and from students and their loved ones on August 28.

Students were in their first week of classes when freshmen and seniors alike were forced by a campus crime alert to hide in classrooms and hope for the best: that they weren't next on the long list of America's school shooting death toll.

Tailei Qi, 34, shot and killed his advisor Zijie Yan, who worked in the Department of Applied Sciences before fleeing the building and triggering a three-hour campus lockdown. But the tragedy reflects a larger trend.

In this year alone, there have been 53 school shootings across the country. In total, there have been more than 30,000 gun-related deaths, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

These types of statistics are what students must grapple with when they decide where to attend college. Will they make it through four years without tragedy, or will their school be one of many that face a mass shooting on campus?

It's a story that some feel is becoming as American as apple pie, and the concern over campus safety does not go unnoticed by current and prospective college students.

According to a recent BestColleges survey, 65 percent of current and prospective college students said school shootings make them concerned for their safety on campus.

But the effects of that go beyond worry after choosing a school – it can even affect where they apply or enroll at in the first place.

After all, a majority of 60 percent said campus safety was a factor they considered when choosing their college, the survey found.

Generation of Trauma

This generation of college students was born into a nation that had already experienced one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history—Columbine, which saw 12 students and one teacher killed in a spree of violence in 1999.

And Columbine was only a sign of what was to come—college students today watched the news of Sandy Hook while they were in elementary school. They demanded change alongside the students of Parkland, and today, the news of yet another shooting numbs them more than it shocks them.

"I felt myself just being scared and shocked, but then not shocked at the same time because it's like, this happens every day," UNC senior journalism student Noel Harris told the Associated Press about her experience on August 28.

College Gun Policies Vary

When a student considers campus safety in undergraduate admissions, they often look at not just how and if a college has handled gun violence in the past but also if the school's policies work to protect them in the first place.

Colleges across the country vary in their gun policies: in a 2022 survey of more than 1,000 colleges and universities, 91 schools allowed guns on campus but "heavily restricted," while another 57 permitted concealed carry.

The differences are in part regional, as 16 states allow schools to individually decide whether guns are allowed on campus, according to BestColleges.

Still, on UNC's campus, it was a mixed bag—state law stipulates it is a felony to possess or carry any firearm on any University campus, but this didn't stop the tragedy from taking place.

In North Carolina, anyone over the age of 18 can purchase a gun without a purchase permit, as long as they aren't designated a "prohibited person."

When it comes to what students are looking for from a university to protect them from gun violence, that part is less clear.

Over half of students say their college should be doing more to protect them at school, the BestColleges survey found.

A majority said stricter gun laws and on-campus police officers would make them feel safer, but students of color were far less likely to say campus police were the answer.