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 14 schools in the New England Region 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 700 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 colleges for criminology students working on their bachelor's 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 Criminology Bachelor's Degree Schools in the New England Region list to help you make the college decision.
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 University of New Hampshire - Main Campus if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. UNH is a large public university located in the fringe town of Durham.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the criminology program state that they receive average early career income of $39,814.
Saint Anselm College is a great option for individuals pursuing a bachelor's degree in criminology. St. Anselm College is a small private not-for-profit college located in the midsize suburb of Manchester.
Criminology bachelor's degree recipients from Saint Anselm College get an earnings boost of around $5,785 over the typical earnings of criminology majors.
Any student pursuing a degree in a bachelor's degree in criminology needs to check out Stonehill College. Located in the large suburb of Easton, Stonehill is a private not-for-profit college with a small student population.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the criminology program state that they receive average early career wages of $40,928.
It's hard to beat Central Connecticut State University if you want to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. Located in the suburb of New Britain, CCSU is a public university with a medium-sized student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the criminology program earn an average of $40,713 in their early career salary.
Assumption is a small private not-for-profit university located in the midsize city of Worcester.
Bachelor's recipients from the criminology major at Assumption University get $7,571 more than the typical 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.