If you pursue a bachelor's degree in criminal justice & corrections, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #7 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 28 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for criminal justice & corrections students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 1,999 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree
The criminal justice bachelor'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 bachelor's degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 bachelor's degree from the school. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their bachelor'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 bachelor'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 bachelor'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 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania list, to help you choose the best school for you.
In addition to College Factual's rankings, you may want to take a look at College Combat, our unique tool that lets you pit your favorite schools head-to-head and compare how they rate on factors that most interest you.
When you have some time, check it out - you may want to bookmark the link so you don't forget it.
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Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in criminal justice & corrections has to check out Temple University. Temple is a very large public university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the criminal justice program earn around $38,612 in their early career salary.
University of Pittsburgh - Pittsburgh Campus is a great choice for students interested in a bachelor's degree in criminal justice & corrections. Pitt is a fairly large public university located in the city of Pittsburgh.
After graduation, criminal justice bachelor's recipients usually earn an average of $36,959 in their early careers.
University of Scranton is one of the finest schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in criminal justice & corrections. Located in the small city of Scranton, University of Scranton is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the criminal justice program make around $32,300 in the first couple years of working.
Located in the town of Shippensburg, Ship is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their bachelor's degree from Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania make $2,995 more than the standard criminal justice student.
Located in the large suburb of Center Valley, DeSales is a private not-for-profit university with a small student population.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their bachelor's degree from DeSales University make $7,357 more than the average criminal justice student.
Located in the medium-sized suburb of York, YCP is a private not-for-profit college with a small student population.
Criminal Justice & Corrections bachelor's degree recipients from York College of Pennsylvania earn a boost of about $4,027 over the average earnings of criminal justice & corrections majors.
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.