If you plan on getting your bachelor's degree in criminology, you won't be alone since the degree program is ranked #53 in the country in terms of popularity. As a result, there are many college that offer the degree, making your choice of school a hard one.
For its 2025 ranking, College Factual looked at 11 schools in Pennsylvania to determine which ones were the best for criminology students pursuing a bachelor's degree. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 400 bachelor's degrees in criminology during the 2022-2023 academic year.
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Choosing a Great Criminology School for Your Bachelor's Degree
The criminology bachelor's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. Important measures of a quality criminology 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
A school that excels in educating for a particular major and degree level must be a great school overall as well. 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.
Early-Career Earnings
One measure we use to determine the quality of a school is to look at the average salary of bachelor's graduates during the early years of their career. That is, everyone wants their bachelor's degree to be worth something, and salaries are one measure of determining that.
Other Factors We Consider
In addition to the above, you should consider some of the following factors:
Major Focus - How much a school focuses on criminology students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - The number of criminology students who choose to seek a bachelor's degree at the school.
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 easy is it for criminology 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 criminology related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best schools for criminology students working on their bachelor's degree.
The criminology school you choose to invest your time and money in matters. To help you make the decision that is right for you, we've developed a number of major-specific rankings, including this list of the Best Criminology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Pennsylvania.
In addition to our rankings, you can take two colleges and compare them based on the criteria that matters most to you in our unique tool, College Combat.
Test it out when you get a chance! You may also want to bookmark the link and share it with others who are trying to make the college decision.
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It's hard to beat Indiana University of Pennsylvania - Main Campus if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. Located in the distant town of Indiana, IUP is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Soon after graduation, criminology bachelor's recipients typically earn around $37,911 in their early careers.
It is difficult to beat Villanova University if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. Located in the large suburb of Villanova, Villanova is a private not-for-profit university with a fairly large student population.More information about a bachelor’s in criminology from Villanova University
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in criminology has to check out Saint Joseph's University. St. Joe's is a moderately-sized private not-for-profit university located in the large city of Philadelphia.
Criminology bachelor's degree recipients from Saint Joseph's University get an earnings boost of about $5,576 over the typical earnings of criminology 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.