Preventing Campus Sexual Assault: Institutional Variation in Prevention Programming Across U.S. Colleges and Universities

The 2013 Campus SaVE Act recommends that American universities provide ongoing sexual assault prevention programming. Based on a representative sample of 381 four-year colleges and universities, we investigate institutional variation in compliance with the Campus SaVE Act’s prevention recommendations. We use theories of organizational responsiveness to legal regulation and hypothesize that coercion, capacity, and commitment shape programming. We find prevention education more likely in schools with fewer Pell grant recipients, higher tuition, and more tenure-track women faculty. Private schools, particularly Christian colleges and Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), were significantly less likely to provide prevention education than public institutions. These findings suggest an underrecognized type of educational inequality—variation in sexual assault prevention programming by institution attended.