The Stop Campus Hazing Act: An introductory guide and how to meet 2026 requirements

The Stop Campus Hazing Act (SCHA) was signed into law in December 2024, including requirements designed to improve campus safety and community awareness.

If your college or university receives federal funding, failure to meet these requirements can put that funding in jeopardy. But more importantly, your institution is more likely to be regarded as unsafe or under-protected by students and parents.

To stay compliant with the law, check out our guide to SCHA and its requirements — both those that are already active and some that will apply soon — and get to know how to better protect your institution and its campus, students and faculty.

The genesis of the Stop Campus Hazing Act

Higher education institutions offer classes to thousands of students on their campuses every year, with some universities’ student enrollments reaching 70,000 or more. With this many adults frequenting campus grounds and many of them participating in student organizations, it’s vital that administrations take the issue of campus hazing seriously, both for the safety of their students and surrounding communities, and to uphold their business continuity standing.

How does campus safety affect business continuity? Simply put, if college and universities don’t maintain strict campus safety standards for their students — whether or not they’re legally bound to — they’re more likely to be seen as unsafe environments by students and their parents, subsequently driving a downward trend for student attendance year over year and imperiling schools’ business continuity postures and overall resilience.

Student hazing on college and university campuses has negatively impacted campus safety for decades, but within the last 20 years or so, independent groups have worked hard to quantify the issue and exert pressure on lawmakers to pass meaningful, actionable legislation.

According to a 2008 study performed by the University of Maine’s Hazing Prevention Research Lab, 73% of students involved in social fraternities or sororities experienced behaviors that fit the definition of hazing to join or maintain membership in their group. But the issue isn’t limited to Greek organizations, as the same study noted that 74% of students involved in varsity athletics programs experienced similar behaviors to join or maintain membership on their team.

More recently, HazingInfo.org, a comprehensive database of college hazing incidents, tabulated that there were 946 reported hazing incidents across nine U.S. states between 2018 and 2025, and that 50% of higher education institutions don’t comply with state laws requiring hazing incidents to be reported. The database also recently partnered with journalist Hank Nuwer to launch a searchable database compiling all 334 reported US campus hazing fatalities since 1838.

And soon, in an effort to update our understanding of the magnitude of college hazing on college and university campuses and catalog the efficacy of college hazing prevention efforts, the Hazing Prevention Research Lab is performing a new National Study of Student Hazing, speaking to students and campus professionals in the Spring 2026 and between Fall 2026 and Spring 2027 respectively.

When students returned en masse to college campuses following COVID-19-related lockdowns and remote learning, universities felt a surge of pressure to renew their commitments to protect students from hazing behaviors. In the fall of 2023, independent organizations like the Clery Center, a national nonprofit that helps colleges and universities to comply with the Clery Act, held important meetings with federal legislators to finally push for a national anti-hazing law.

This law, commonly referred to as the Stop Campus Hazing Act (SCHA), was signed into law on December 23, 2024. Most of the law’s deadlines have already passed. However, at least one more is coming up fast. We’ll therefore contextualize it with earlier campus safety legislation like the Clery Act, spell out its central parameters and key dates and drive home how advanced solutions like security management software can help your organization stay compliant.

A quick primer on the Clery Act

The Jeanne Clery Disclosure of Campus Security Policy and Campus Crime Statistics Act, commonly referred to as the Clery Act, provided a linguistic and legislative model upon which the Stop Campus Hazing Act was based. The Clery Act’s approach to federally regulating an issue of national concern that occurs locally, like campus hazing, informed much of the bill’s structure and execution.

Passed in 1990, the Clery Act was a legislative response to what was deemed lax security measures on U.S. college and university campuses, and a lack of transparency from college and university administrations regarding campus violence. The parents of the law’s namesake, Jeanne Clery — an unfortunate victim of campus violence — spent years advocating for laws at local, state and federal levels that would require schools to take responsibility for the safety of their physical spaces, and the Clery Act is the culmination of these efforts.

For those unfamiliar with the parameters of Clery Act, it requires U.S. postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding to:

• Compile and distribute an Annual Security Report (ASR) composed of:
• The previous three years of campus crime statistics for multiple categories of crimes that occurred in areas within, adjacent to and surrounding campus
• Details of the school’s formal initiatives or other measures taken to improve campus safety
• Evaluate if an applicable crime signifies a serious or ongoing threat to the campus community, and if it does, send notifications to all staff and students
• Ensure that campus police and/or local public safety departments maintain and make publicly available a daily crime log of all reported crimes that fall within their collective jurisdiction
• Send emergency notifications to affected area(s) of campus about events that pose an immediate and significant danger to the health of safety of the campus community
• Adopt emergency response procedures and test plans annually against defined and measurable goals

The Clery Act was an amendment to the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA), building its protections upon a legislative foundation dedicated to strengthening student rights to safety and access to education. It has also been amended, by the Campus Sexual Violence Act (SaVE Act) provision of the 2013 Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act (VAWA), demonstrating that the door is open for additional future regulations in this area.

The requirements set forth in the Clery Act cannot, and therefore don’t, eliminate the threat of campus violence, the possibility of on-campus emergency incidents or the risk students have to experience another dangerous situation on or near U.S. college campuses. However, by mandating the above actions, the government ensures that students attending U.S. institutions of higher learning are reasonably informed and aware of the dangers they may encounter.

Requirements of the Stop Campus Hazing Act

Similar to the Clery Act, the SCHA inserts amended language into the Higher Education Act of 1965 that prescribes additional campus hazing requirements for colleges and universities. These requirements are designed to ensure that U.S. colleges and universities maintain a policy of transparency around hazing statistics, hazing policies and any acts of hazing perpetrated by specific student groups.

According to the bill, U.S. postsecondary institutions that receive federal funding must:

• Include hazing incidents in compiled and distributed ASRs, relying on specified definitions for both “hazing” and “student organization”
• Develop a comprehensive hazing policy statement that includes:
• Current institutional anti-hazing policies
• A description of reporting procedures for hazing incidents
• A description of hazing incident investigation procedures
• Information on applicable local, state and tribal anti-hazing laws, relying on the respective definition of “hazing” for each jurisdiction
• A description of policies regarding hazing prevention and awareness programs, including specified prevention strategies and a distribution program with intent to reach all students, staff and faculty
• Develop a Campus Hazing Transparency Report that summarizes findings regarding specific incidents of hazing performed by student organizations found to be in violation of the institution’s standards of conduct related to hazing, which must be:
• Updated twice a year, and;
• Posted prominently on the institution’s public website

It’s also important to note that the findings for each incident listed within the Campus Hazing Transparency Report should not include personally identifiable information (PII) or any info that could potentially reveal such information. To protect students’ privacy, any hazing incidents listed within this report should only include the names of the student organizations in question, basic descriptions of the violations and any related dates.

Timeline for Stop Campus Hazing Act compliance

Most of the key dates for compliance with the SCHA have passed, so it is critical for your institution to review your campus hazing policies and reporting procedures to be sure you’re in compliance and not at risk of losing any federal funding you may receive.

The full list of key dates are as follows:

• January 1, 2025: Start collecting hazing statistics to include in your ASR.
• June 23, 2025: If they aren’t already, campus hazing policies must be implemented.
• July 1, 2025: If it isn’t already, a documentation process for violations of the institution’s standards of conduct relating to hazing must be implemented.
• December 23, 2025: The Campus Hazing Transparency Report must be publicly available, including any violations documented beginning in July.
• October 1, 2026: Hazing statistics must be included in the institution’s 2026 ASR, and in every ASR going forward.

Once you update your ASR compilation process with the final requirement — the inclusion of hazing statistics — you’ll just need to make sure that every requirement is regularly completed on a continual basis as part of your campus hazing program.

How to plan for Stop Campus Hazing Act compliance

If your organization has not already adjusted your institution’s campus safety processes and policies to guarantee full compliance with the SCHA, it should be relatively easy, especially given that you already have years of experience complying with multiple similar requirements for the Clery Act. But to help you get started, we recommend the following general guidelines:

• Develop a centralized workspace for the logging of hazing statistics in all applicable geographies. Consider a digital hub with permission requirements to guarantee that only applicable team members have access, and database functionality to enable any future searching, sorting, report generation or the like.
• Expand existing Clery Act-related policies to add the recording and compilation of hazing incident statistics to the upkeep of ASRs. No need to reinvent the wheel. Additionally, take the opportunity to review your Clery Act incident statistic recording policy and see if additional steps can be taken to further ensure compliance.
• Perform a comprehensive review of all hazing policies, particularly those defined within your institution’s standards of conduct. If your institution doesn’t have any, or hasn’t been reviewed in a while, make sure that at the bare minimum, your policy incorporates:
• Primary prevention strategies intended to stop hazing before it occurs;
• Skill building methodologies for bystander intervention;
• Information about ethical leadership, and;
• Strategies for building group cohesion without hazing
• When defining or updating hazing incident reporting procedures, remember that the percentage of reported incidents is never 100%. Demonstrate awareness of sensitivity that victims may feel after experiencing hazing behaviors. When urging students to report hazing incidents, do so from a place of accountability, not judgment.
• Establish clear directives for team members recording incident findings for the Campus Hazing Transparency Report, especially in the area of PII or PII-revelatory data. Despite that transparency regarding campus safety is highly important, student privacy is paramount.
• Schedule regular twice-yearly Campus Hazing Transparency Report update cycles for each calendar year. Delineate tasks and responsibilities to applicable team members to foster a culture of accountability.

How security management software assists Stop Campus Hazing Act compliance

College and university administrations that prioritize compliance with campus safety laws like the SCHA understand the direct relationship between maintenance of campus safety and business continuity. But the rigors of maintaining compliance with these regulations get substantially easier through the use of flexible, advanced digital tools like security management software, with customization options for easy incident recording and reporting.

Considering the amount of data necessary to record and report incidents for Clery Act and SCHA compliance, manual incident logging is highly time-consuming, and therefore costly in person-hours. Relying on manual incident recording and reporting instead of all-hazards management technology also invites many opportunities for human error.

When selecting security management software for your postsecondary institution, look for a system that lets your team:

• Incident reporting and compliance: Create custom forms for SCHA-related hazing incident recording, with the precise fields needed to capture only the information required
• Report generation and distribution: Generate required reports like ASRs and share them throughout or across teams via QR codes, SMS, or a secure mobile application
• Situational awareness and data integration: Optimize situational awareness with customizable dashboards that integrate real-time news, weather, geographic, and meteorological data from credible sources and feeds
• Threat intelligence and risk management: Stay on top of potential threats to people, assets, and reputation with AI-driven threat intelligence that streamlines escalation and support effective incident response
• Stakeholder and asset monitoring: Manage persons, organizations, and assets of interest and send notices to teams as needed with up-to-date intelligence that supports better decision-making
• Post-incident analysis and case management: Prevent incident recurrence and improve response with more thorough post-event learnings from incident investigations, including easy-to-record case notes
• Workflow automation and incident recovery: Respond to incidents more efficiently and expedite recovery through customizable workflows with automated notifications and detailed response action assignments

The cost of noncompliance with SCHA and related campus safety laws is far too high. To properly preserve the safety of your student bodies, maintain good standing with parents and your local communities, avoid costly noncompliance fees and improve your overall business continuity posture, implementing advanced security management software is the clear choice.

Don’t wait until your next hazing incident occurs — request a demo of Noggin today and stay one step ahead.