Graduate Education in Criminal Justice

A special thanks to Dr. Thomas O'Connor for allowing JPS to use these pages.

If you have a fairly decent grade point average (generally, no lower than 2.75 or so), an average or above-average score on the GRE, and can get good letters of recommendation, you should consider applying to graduate school in criminal justice. Remember the application deadline for most places is sometime around March every year.

If you are dead set on going to LAW SCHOOL, and you know your gpa and have a practice score on the LSAT, visit the Law School Locator to see where you might qualify and the Law School Admission Council for more information. For a look at the right and wrong reasons to go to Law School, visit the Law Student Bitch & Moan Page. For web links to all the nation's law schools, see the Directory of Legal Academia, Legal-Pad, or the AllRise ranking of top twenty law schools. Best of all, visit my MegaLaw webpage.

If you are more interested in FORENSIC SCIENCE, check out the American Board of Criminalists list of Forensic Science Grad Programs or the more readable Reddy's List.

For undergraduate programs in Forensic Science and Criminal Justice, visit Criminal Justice and Forensic Science Related Sites on the Web.

Graduate degrees in CJ take less time to complete than a Bachelor's degree, they're cheaper in cost (with the exception of law schools), and you are at no time more prepared than now for the challenge. The main thing besides smarts is willpower and how you get along with people, particularly professor-type people. You must aspire to that advanced degree with all your heart and be willing to persevere no matter what.

Written Sources of Information

Peterson's Guide, Barron's Guide, and Arco's Guide are three of the most well-known catalogs and are easily found in any library or bookstore. For CJ specifically, see if your local library or career center has a copy of "The Directory of Criminal Justice Education: Including Law, Criminology and Justice Related Programs" which details programs at more than 1000 institutions nationwide. I'm not sure who the publisher is anymore, but you might be able to check with ACJS or ASC.

Like the links below, the above publication will give program information, the average number of students in residence and the number of graduates per year. Each department's emphasis and each professor's specialty are also listed. John Jay and Eastern Kentucky, for example, are known for their law enforcement emphasis, and Sam Houston State is known for its corrections emphasis, and often, these reputations stand even though the curricula have been modified thru the years.

Students often  want a ranking of the grad schools in terms of quality, prestige, reputation, etc. This is a highly controversial area plagued with conceptualization and measurement problems, and one should be reluctant to support any such efforts. There are simply no schools better or worse than any other; all have about the same attrition rate, the same difficulty level, the same egos involved, the same chances of employment when you graduate, etc. Also, programs themselves change rapidly from year to year in response to curriculum reviews, reaccreditations, university politics, and faculty turnover. It is probably important you consider the cost of living, quality of life, political climate and other factors in deciding which state and school to select.

The Importance of Faculty Egos

Don't apply to a grad program if there is only one professor there who specializes in your interest, no matter if it seems like a perfect match. He or she may move, get sick, or take a sabbatical during your stay, and you will have trouble putting together a thesis or dissertation committee. The rule of thumb is to find a critical mass of dependable faculty with some overlap in specialties and then choose a common topic but one that none of them feels too strongly about. Your thesis or dissertation is going to eventually revolve around THEIR interests, not your's, but all the ideas up front are going to have to come from you. Expect revisions for revision's sake. They're testing you.

You need to know if your prospective committee members are compatible with one another and will protect you from department politics. The best way to find this out is thru observation or hearsay, but you might be able to garner some impression by visiting faculty web pages or those of the universities themselves. There is also a special web site set up by the ASC (American Society of Criminology) called the E-mail Mentoring Directory, which allows you to contact professors who have volunteered to provide thoughtful advice to struggling grad students. Use this list to find and ask questions from somebody in a particular specialty. At least get to know our two professional associations: the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences.

Online Sources of Information- Criminal Justice Doctoral Study

Why not go all the way to the doctorate? Criminal Justice is a growth area; about 100 new Ph.D.s are needed every year. If you apply to places supporting both the master's and doctoral degree, and are planning to attend full-time, you will find your progress towards the master's nothing less than phenomenal (two years or less). You can then stay at the same school (without reapplying in most cases, on a "fast track") to pursue the Ph.D. (which will normally take only another two or three years). Warning: doctoral programs generally require comp exams, strong quantitative skills (a conceptual and practical understanding of advanced statistics), strong writing skills (you may have to turn out two to three 20-page term papers per course per semester), and in most cases, translate a foreign language or learn a computer programming language, and then there's the 300-600 page dissertation.