If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #11 in the country in terms of popularity. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 25 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students pursuing a bachelor's degree. Combined, these schools handed out 2,340 bachelor's degrees in homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting to qualified students.
DEBUG: Checking offer "Grad Cert - Law Enforcement (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.8
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Grad Cert - Law Enforcement (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.8)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Corrections (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.7
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Corrections (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.7)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Criminology (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" with relevance 0.5
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Criminology (I Have a HS Diploma or Associate Degree)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.5)
DEBUG: Checking offer "Grad Cert - Criminology (I Have a Bachelors)" with relevance 0.5
DEBUG: ✓ Offer "Grad Cert - Criminology (I Have a Bachelors)" ACCEPTED (relevance 0.5)
DEBUG: relevant_offers count = 4
DEBUG: relevant_offers > 0, checking for ESYOH offers
DEBUG: ESYOH filtering - found 4 ESYOH offers with relevance >= 0.5
DEBUG: esyoh_offers count = 4
DEBUG: ESYOH offers found, rendering ESYOH widget
DEBUG: most_relevant_only = true, filtering for most relevant
DEBUG: Found 0 offers with relevance >= 1.0
DEBUG: Backfilling with 0 offers with relevance >= 0.9
DEBUG: Backfilling with 1 offers with relevance >= 0.8
Choosing a Great Homeland Security, Law Enforcement & Firefighting School for Your Bachelor's Degree
Your choice of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting for getting your bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
Overall Quality Is a Must
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 school's overall Best Colleges 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 Early-Career Salaries
Average early-career salary of those graduating with their bachelor's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your bachelor's degree won't mean much if it doesn't help you find a job that will help you earn a living.
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 - The number of homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students who choose to seek a bachelor's 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 much debt homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting students go into to obtain their bachelor's 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 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 bachelor'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 Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
To further help you make the college decision, we've developed a unique tool called College Combat that allows you to compare schools based on the factors that matter the most to you.
Go ahead and give it a try, or bookmark the link so you can check it out later.
DEBUG: Raw major_slug = "protective-security-safety-services"
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 bachelor's degree school matters. Important measures of a quality homeland security, law enforcement & firefighting program can vary widely even among the top schools. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
