The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

"Colleges and universities need to face the facts about sexual assault," Vice President Biden said last week, introducing the administration's latest plans to combat sexual assault on campus.

That's for sure.

Research cited by the vice president shows that as many as one in five women on campus will be sexually assaulted before they graduate. Think about that number. If accurate, it means college women will suffer 2.4 million sexual assaults every four years.

A problem of that scale will not be solved by the sort of tinkering that colleges typically apply. It requires treating rape as a crime, not as a violation of campus rules.

The strongest punishment schools can deliver is to expel a rapist from campus. That's an appropriate punishment for cheating on a physics final, not for a felony on par with murder and armed robbery. Campus judicial systems aren't designed to address that sort of offense.

So they are failing. The Department of Education is investigating 55 schools on possible violations of female students' civil rights by mishandling sexual assault cases. Schools are accused of pushing victims not to report their crimes to police, dragging cases on for months without resolution and failing to investigate serious allegations.

When the system fails, college rapists are free to strike again. According to research cited by the White House, the vast majority of campus sexual assaults are carried out by serial predators. The typical college rapist has six victims. But even when sexual assault investigations succeed, correctly identifying the perpetrator and delivering the maximum sentence, the result is the same. College rapists are free to strike again. They'll just have to choose from a different set of potential victims.

Reform efforts don't change this simple fact, nor do they succeed in changing the other core problems with what passes for justice on campuses.

A system run by university employees will always face the temptation to put the school's interest above the interest of victims. Similar ethical conflicts in the military have led activists to demand that sexual assault cases be removed from the jurisdiction of base commanders and their subordinates.

Federal law compounds the rape problem by inviting secrecy. Schools can't make convictions public. When a rapist applies to another school, admissions officers have no database to check.

As bad as schools are at providing justice for rape victims, they might be worse at protecting the rights of the accused.

Across the country, accused students don't have the right to see all the evidence against them, and administrators can find a student guilty based on low levels of proof, rather than "clear and convincing evidence." Protecting the accused is no small matter when 2% to 10% of rape accusations are found to be false and many more are riddled with uncertainty.

Until colleges and local government find a way to bring the full power of criminal courts to bear on sexual assault among students, campus courts will remain second-class justice for both rape victims and those who are accused.

USA TODAY's editorial opinions are decided by its Editorial Board, separate from the news staff. Most editorials are coupled with an opposing view — a unique USA TODAY feature.