a master's degree in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting is more popular than many other degrees. In fact, it ranks #14 out of 37 on popularity of all such degrees in the nation. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
In 2025, College Factual analyzed 7 schools in order to identify the top ones for its Best Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 890 master's degrees in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting School for Your Master's Degree
Your choice of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting program can vary widely even among the top schools. 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 quality education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this we include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a collection 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 many resources a school devotes to homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting 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 homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting 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 homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting Master's Degree Schools in the Far Western US Region ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
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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.
Some other college data, including much of the graduate earnings data, comes from the U.S. Department of Education’s (College Scorecard).
Your choice of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting for getting your master's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting program can vary widely even among the top schools. To make it into this list, a school must excel in the following areas.
