If you pursue a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #30 most popular program in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual reviewed 8 schools in Massachusetts to determine which ones were the best for master's degree seekers in the field of criminal justice & corrections. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 490 master's degrees in criminal justice & corrections during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Criminal Justice & Corrections School for Your Master's Degree
The criminal justice master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
A Great Overall School
The overall quality of a master's degree school is important to ensure a good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we consider a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of master's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their master's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
The metrics below are just some of the other metrics that we use to determine our rankings.
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on criminal justice & corrections students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other criminal justice & corrections students want to attend this school to pursue a master's degree.
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.
Student Debt - How easy is it for criminal justice & corrections to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized criminal justice & corrections related body.
Our full ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for criminal justice & corrections students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Criminal Justice & Corrections Schools
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Master's Degree Schools in Massachusetts list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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University of Massachusetts - Lowell is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections. UMass Lowell is a fairly large public university located in the large suburb of Lowell.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their master's degree from University of Massachusetts - Lowell make $26,471 more than the standard criminal justice student.
Any student who is interested in a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections has to look into Northeastern University. Located in the city of Boston, Northeastern is a private not-for-profit university with a very large student population.
Master's graduates who receive their degree from the criminal justice program earn an average of $47,269 in their early career salary.
Curry is a small private not-for-profit college located in the suburb of Milton.
Master's recipients from the criminal justice & corrections degree program at Curry College get $54,024 above the standard graduate in this field shortly after graduation.
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.
The criminal justice master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. This section explores some of the factors we include in our ranking and how much they vary depending on the school you select. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
