Ranked #30 in popularity, criminal justice & corrections is one of the most sought-after master's degree programs in the nation. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 12 schools in Florida to determine which ones were the best for criminal justice & corrections students pursuing a master's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 589 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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
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 host of different factors like degree completion, educational resources, student body caliber and post-graduation earnings for the school as a whole.
Average Earnings
To determine the overall quality of a graduate school, one factor we look at is the average early-career salary of those receiving their master's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their master's degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
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 complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools 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 Florida list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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Florida State University is one of the best schools in the United States for getting a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections. Florida State is a very large public university located in the medium-sized city of Tallahassee.
Master's recipients from the criminal justice & corrections major at Florida State University make $9,512 above the average college grad with the same degree shortly after graduation.
It's difficult to beat Saint Leo University if you want to pursue a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections. St. Leo University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the fringe town of Saint Leo.
Master's recipients from the criminal justice & corrections program at Saint Leo University get $6,642 more than the typical graduate with the same degree when they enter the workforce.
Keiser University - Ft Lauderdale is a wonderful decision for students pursuing a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections. Located in the medium-sized city of Fort Lauderdale, Keiser University - Ft Lauderdale is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Master's students who receive their degree from the criminal justice program earn about $39,520 for their early career.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections has to look into University of Central Florida. Located in the suburb of Orlando, UCF is a public university with a fairly large student population.
After graduating, criminal justice master's recipients generally make an average of $45,983 in their early careers.
Located in the suburb of Fort Lauderdale, NUS Florida is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their master's degree from Nova Southeastern University make $4,647 more than the average criminal justice student.
UNF is a large public university located in the city of Jacksonville.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their master's degree from University of North Florida receive $4,160 more than the typical criminal justice graduate.
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. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
