If you pursue a associate degree in criminal justice & corrections, you won't be alone. The field of study is the #4 most popular program in the country. This makes choosing the right school a hard decision.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 6 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Associate Degree Schools in Illinois ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 323 associate degrees in criminal justice & corrections during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Criminal Justice & Corrections School for Your Associate Degree
The criminal justice associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality criminal justice program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
Quality Overall Is Important
The overall quality of a associate degree school is important to ensure a quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To make it into this list a school must rank well in our overall Best Colleges ranking. This ranking considered factors such as graduation rates, overall graduate earnings and other educational resources to identify great colleges and universities.
Average Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of associate graduates during the early years of their career. This is because one of the main reasons people pursue their associate degree is to enable themselves to find better-paying positions.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How many resources a school devotes to criminal justice & corrections students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other criminal justice & corrections students want to attend this school to pursue a associate degree.
Educational Resources - The amount of money and other resources allocated to students while they are pursuing their degree. These resources include such things as number of students per instructor and education expenditures per student.
Student Debt - How much debt criminal justice & corrections students go into to obtain their associate degree and how well they are able to pay back that debt.
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 colleges for criminal justice & corrections students working on their associate degree.
When choosing the right school for you, it's important to arm yourself with all the facts you can. To that end, we've created a number of major-specific rankings, including this Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Associate Degree Schools in Illinois list to help you make the college decision.
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Any student who is interested in an associate degree in criminal justice & corrections needs to check out Rasmussen University - Illinois. Rasmussen University - Illinois is a small private for-profit university located in the city of Rockford.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their associate degree from Rasmussen University - Illinois make $13,179 more than the average criminal justice student.
Any student who is interested in an associate degree in criminal justice & corrections has to take a look at William Rainey Harper College. Harper College is a large public college located in the large suburb of Palatine.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their associate degree from William Rainey Harper College earn $4,206 more than the typical criminal justice graduate.
It's hard to beat College of DuPage if you want to pursue an associate degree in criminal justice & corrections. COD is a fairly large public college located in the large suburb of Glen Ellyn.
Students who graduate with their associate from the criminal justice program report average early career earnings of $28,749.
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 associate degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality criminal justice program can vary widely even among the top schools. When choosing a school we recommend considering some of the following factors:
