Criminal Justice & Corrections is of the hottest associate degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #4 most popular major in the country. This means there are lots of options to choose from when you decide to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Associate Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 422 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
Your choice of criminal justice & corrections for getting your associate degree school matters. 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. To account for this we consider 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.
Early-Career Earnings
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their associate degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. That is, everyone wants their associate 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 - The number of criminal justice & corrections 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.
Student Debt - How easy is it for criminal justice & corrections to pay back their student loans after receiving their associate 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 associate degree.
More Ways to Rank Criminal Justice & Corrections Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Associate Degree Schools in the Rocky Mountains Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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Any student who is interested in an associate degree in criminal justice & corrections needs to take a look at College of Southern Idaho. College of Southern Idaho is a moderately-sized public college located in the small city of Twin Falls.
Soon after graduating, criminal justice associate recipients typically earn around $30,479 in the first five years of their career.
Salt Lake Community College is a great decision for individuals interested in an associate degree in criminal justice & corrections. Salt Lake Community College is a very large public college located in the suburb of Salt Lake City.
Associate recipients from the criminal justice & corrections degree program at Salt Lake Community College make $9,790 more than the average 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.