What majors and/or minors would you recommend for someone that wants to work in federal law enforcement or national security?
Some of the schools my son has applied to actually have National Security majors. Many other schools have Criminal Justice or Legal Studies majors with different concentrations.
He’s actually looking at an Intelligence Analysis major, but it’s very competitive in terms of admittance during sophomore year.
A few schools have majors structured in ways that you can obtain a double major, or a major with 2 minors in 4 years.
He realizes that he needs a combination of qualifications to make him more desirable. The question is, what are those qualifications?
For intelligence analysis, they look for anybody that has a major that develops analytical skills, although there is a slight preference for liberal arts. Really, anything! International Relations, Communications, Data Science are majors they recruit specifically, but Math, CS, and Physics, are also popular majors for the career field.
Criminal justice is not really a good major to go into federal law enforcement, actually. Neither is legal studies. The FBI actually prefers accounting and computer science majors to those!
The FBI has a [url=<a href=“https://www.fbijobs.gov/career-paths/special-agents%5Dwebsite%5B/url”>https://www.fbijobs.gov/career-paths/special-agents]website[/url] where they list some general information about what they’re looking for. Specifically, they say they are looking for people with backgrounds in STEM fields, foreign languages, law (actual attorneys), emergency medicine, CPAs, detectives (so people with previous law enforcement experience), former military, and pilots (particularly helicopter pilots).
On an older page that is no longer accessible, they originally wrote that criminal justice and political science majors face a LOT of competition; they are typically only competitive if they have an advanced degree and/or some professional experience (especially military or former law enforcement). I would imagine lawyers are similar: there are so many lawyers that the most competitive lawyers likely have some experience working closely with law enforcement and doing criminal law, especially high profile work.
FBI Special Agents must also have at least 3 years of professional work experience - even with advanced degrees. Other national security and federal law enforcement agencies also tend to prefer people with relevant experience.
National security encompasses a lot of agencies and careers. Being prior military is at least as common as any other route. I would advise looking into ROTC.