2025 Best Criminal Justice & Police Science Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region
12Colleges in the Southwest Region
488Associate Degrees
Ranked #14 in popularity, criminal justice & police science is one of the most sought-after associate degree programs in the nation. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in the Southwest Region to determine which ones were the best for criminal justice & police science students pursuing a associate degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 488 associate degrees in criminal justice & police science during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Criminal Justice & Police Science School for Your Associate Degree
Your choice of criminal justice & police science for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality police science program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To take this into account we consider a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination of various factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to criminal justice & police science students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - The number of criminal justice & police science students who choose to seek a associate degree at the school.
Educational Resources - How many resources are allocated to students. These resources may include educational expenditures per student, number of students per instructor, and graduation rate among other things.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized criminal justice & police science related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for criminal justice & police science students working on their associate degree.
The police science school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Criminal Justice & Police Science Associate Degree Schools in the Southwest Region.
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The bars on the spread charts above show the distribution of the schools on this list +/- one standard deviation from the mean.
The Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a branch of the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) serves as the core of the rest of our data about colleges.
by our College Data Analytics Team
Your choice of criminal justice & police science for getting your associate degree school matters. Important measures of a quality police science program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
