Although my personal plan is not to major in criminal justice, I’ve heard from several individuals that criminal justice is a great degree to have, whilst others have told me that it is one of the weakest and easiest degrees available. I am at a clash! It is great, or is it in reality weak? What are the chances of getting a job after college with a bachelors in criminal justice?
Criminal Justice is typically a very easy major. No thinking allowed.
It’s not one of the more academic majors. Getting a job? Depends on your ideas about the work you’d like to do.
But you say you won’t be majoring in it, so why are you “at a clash?”
My sister wants to major in C.J, so I’ve been trying to help her with her search. Didn’t mean to confuse you, sorry.
It’s a very weak degree, albeit one that is easy to get. It will NOT get you a job with the FBI, contrary to what some may think (unless you are fluent in Arabic). It will likely also not help you get into any other federal law enforcement agencies unless you have something really special to bring to the table, like mad computer skills or fluency in a valued language. Those agencies prefer traditional BA/BS degrees and many even require JDs or masters degrees. It can’t get you into a respected forensic position because that would require scientific training and education. What it can help you do is become a police officer or work for a local pretrial or probation department or as a criminal investigator for a district attorney’s office or public defender’s office, assuming you also take regional civil service tests and place competently on those (not hard to do). Assuming you have interest in such a field, it may not be a bad way to go. You will never get rich but you will get a government job with benefits like generous paid sick and vacation time, pension/401K plans, and regular salary increases, in many cases. Some police forces pay very well. The other jobs I mentioned offer little emotional reward and are basically paycheck positions. The proliferation in criminal justice curricula and majors at many colleges is mostly a sham, IMHO, designed to capitalize on the current extreme popularity of criminal investigation TV shows. I am familiar with some of the programs offered and am not at all impressed. I think they are designed to suck unknowing students in without disclosing the realities of life after graduation. A similar thing happened with law schools in the late 1980s, when everybody watched LA Law and saw gorgeous TV lawyers who wore fabulous clothes and drove around in cool cars and had lots of free time to do interesting things, and conducted glamorous trials in court that miraculously required no tedious prep time and conveniently disposed of anything boring like lawful introduction of evidence. It was very much a poor representation of how most young lawyers live, but applications to law schools skyrocketed at the time. My advice: stay away from this course of study unless you are familiar with the types of jobs it will realistically prepare you for, and that type of work is what you truly desire in life.
It’s a pipeline to work in law enforcement or corrections (polie officer, etc). It’s considered very easy and vocational.
If you want a job with the FBI or any “big” agency, or if you want to go to law school, the degree you want is either cybersecurity or data science and/or a critical language (Arabic, Chinese, Russian, Turkish, Urdu, Korean…) Combining both is possible at highly-recruited, elite programs called Critical language flagships, where you become fluent in a critical language and major.
For instance:
https://thelanguageflagship.org/
You could also study “criminology”.
Here are some videos from the top undergraduate program:
https://ccjs.umd.edu/landingtopic/criminology-21st-century
Here, criminology, at the flagship:
https://rap.psu.edu/recommended-academic-plan-criminology-bs-crmbs-university-park
Compare with Criminal Justice, which, tellingly, is not offered at the flagship but at a “branch campus”
https://bulletins.psu.edu/undergraduate/colleges/abington/criminal-justice-bs/#suggestedacademicplantext
Thank you so much you have no idea just how much this helped!!!
Why would studying criminology better than studying criminal justice?
Criminology is a legitimate academic field.
The students admitted to that major must have excellent reading and synthesis skills+must be able to handle math and CS.
Just compare the level of rigor for the two majors. It should be pretty obvious one is meant to be “easy”.