What's epidemic on college campuses? Shallow thinking

Article here. To jump the paywall, Google the first sentence from the excerpt and click on the link that leads to the article in the Chicago Tribune. Excerpt:

'Remember in 1986, when Newsweek supposedly showed that a 40-year-old single woman was "more likely to be killed by a terrorist" than to ever get married? It turned out to be false, the remark of a Newsweek correspondent, who'd meant it merely as a funny aside. And the studies on which it was presumably based? Flawed.

Nonetheless, until the magazine issued an official retraction 20 years later, that factoid occupied the murky space between conventional wisdom and urban myth. That is to say, it felt depressingly true and totally unbelievable — with an emphasis on felt. Regardless of the truth of the situation, the media and other parties cried wolf, which proved effective in getting people's attention. After all, the real figure — it turns out that single women older than 40 have about a 40 percent chance of marrying — didn't have quite the same ring to it.

Today, another statistic is bandied about with similar abandon, and it concerns something much more serious than securing a husband. The phrase "1 in 5 college women will be sexually assaulted" over the course of their university enrollment has become absorbed into the lingua franca of gender politics and anti-rape advocacy. Even President Barack Obama, who established a campus sexual assault prevention task force, rattles it off.

The problem is that there are about 12 million students currently enrolled in U.S. colleges, and the study that gave rise to that figure, the Campus Sexual Assault Study, published in 2007, sampled just under 5,500 of them from just two schools. In a Dec. 7 articlethat took an exhaustive look at this data, Slate's Emily Yoffe quotes the study's lead author, who insists that his findings do not amount to a nationally representative sample. Yoffe also points out that the survey's definition of sexual assault covered everything from nonconsensual intercourse to "forced kissing," "fondling" and "rubbing up against you in a sexual way, even if it is over your clothes."'