More Than 500 Campus Hazing Incidents in Last Year

Nearly two years after the first ever federal antihazing legislation went into effect, a clearer picture of just how widespread hazing is on college campuses across the United States is beginning to emerge.

Between July 2025 and August 2026, there were at least 556 hazing incidents across the 1,441 colleges and universities that have bachelor’s degree programs and on-campus housing, according to a recent analysis by HazingInfo. Two incidents resulted in death: Colin Martinez at Northern Arizona University and Savanna Jones at Wilberforce University in Ohio.

“For the first time we’re able to wrap our arms around what hazing looks like across college campuses,” said Jolayne Houtz, who founded HazingInfo after her son, Samuel Martinez, died in 2019 after he was forced to consume lethal quantities of alcohol as part of fraternity initiation at Washington State University. “Hazing tends to be reported as these one-off tragic incidents that happen in a disconnected way every so often across the country. Now we’re starting to see the bigger picture come into view, and it’s happening on campuses of all kinds—large, small, rural, urban, private, public.”

About one in six U.S. colleges and universities reported at least one hazing incident in the past year, according to HazingInfo’s analysis.

Before Congress passed the Stop Campus Hazing Act in 2024—after years of advocacy by hazing victims’ families—there was no federal requirement for colleges and universities to publicly report hazing incidents. The new law requires any institution receiving Title IV funding to include hazing incidents—investigated or not—in its annual security reports it sends to the federal government. The new law also requires colleges to publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report online twice a year, which includes incidents of hazing that have been confirmed after an investigation.

While the first annual security reports to include hazing aren’t due until Oct. 1 of this year, HazingInfo used the available hazing-transparency reports on college websites to get an initial idea of hazing frequency during the 2025–26 academic year (the first full year of reporting).

Hazing Likely Even More Widespread

However, the actual number of hazing incidents that happened last academic year was likely much higher than the 556 HazingInfo found in the campus transparency reports this summer.

That’s in part because institutions are only required to include in their transparency reports hazing incidents that resulted in a formal finding of a hazing-related conduct violation. According to HazingInfo, just 54 percent of colleges and universities have published updated reports.

There are a couple of different reasons why 46 percent of colleges may not have reported hazing, Houtz said.

“In many cases it may be because they don’t have hazing incidents to report, which is great. But they should share that information and let everybody know and remove any doubt from the minds of students and families who might be looking for that information,” she said. “But it also could mean that they have hazing reports and they’re just not sharing them, or that they know hazing is happening, but it’s not getting through the investigation and reporting process and making it out the other side into a report.”

S. Daniel Carter, a campus safety consultant who advocated for the federal antihazing legislation, also believes that the number of hazing incidents that happened last year is higher than HazingInfo’s estimate.

“Getting to a reportable hazing violation is a very high bar,” he told Inside Higher Ed. “First of all, it has to be reported. It has to be investigated and go through the process to reach a finding that a violation occurred.”

What he’s more interested in are how many hazing reports institutions have recorded since January 2025, which they’ve been collecting since the law first went into effect and must finalize next month. Although those numbers won’t be included in the Education Department’s next annual Campus Safety and Security Survey due to hangups in the regulatory process, they’ll still be available for groups like HazingInfo—which merged with the research and prevention group StopHazing Monday—to analyze.

“I anticipate those statistics will show a lot more incidents of hazing than the campus transparency reports have,” Carter said. “Even those won’t capture the full scope of the problem because hazing is significantly underreported—something this law is also hoping to change.”