Parents in the United States worried about the safety of their children at university can now check campus crime rates, as the government publishes university crime statistics on the internet.

These performance tables for safety, covering every college and university in the country, provide details of recorded crime, both in and out of university accommodation.

These include murders and assaults, sexual offences, robberies, burglaries and car thefts - with a separate set of tables for "hate crimes" such as racist attacks.

Universities are required to provide the information under "disclosure" laws introduced after the murder of a student in Pennsylvania, whose parents subsequently discovered there had been dozens of previous violent incidents at the same university.

Safety

"Safety is certainly a concern for parents and students in selecting a college," said Education Secretary Richard Riley. "This is the next step in making such information readily available."

The tables do not provide a ranking of highest and lowest crime rates, but each entry provides a detailed breakdown of the frequency and type of crime.

For example, the University of California at Los Angeles recorded no murders in 1999, but there were eight "forcible sexual offences" on campus, three robberies, 10 assaults and 136 burglaries.

The tables also show comparisons with the two previous years, so Wayne State University in Detroit can show for that unlike 1997 and 1998, there were no murders on the campus last year and that figures for other crimes also reduced.

But there have been questions raised about how the statistics have been gathered, as the tables include large colleges which claim to have had no recorded crimes in the previous year.