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 7 schools in Texas 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 351 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
Your choice of criminology for getting your bachelor's 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
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 take this into account we consider a school's overall Best Colleges ranking which itself looks at a combination 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 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
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 criminology students as compared to other majors.
Major Demand - How many other criminology students want to attend this school to pursue a bachelor'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 much debt criminology 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 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.
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Criminology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Texas ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that 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 difficult to beat The University of Texas at Dallas if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. UT Dallas is a very large public university located in the city of Richardson.
Those criminology students who get their bachelor's degree from The University of Texas at Dallas earn $6,086 more than the average criminology student.
University of Houston - Clear Lake is a great decision for individuals interested in a bachelor's degree in criminology. Located in the city of Houston, UH Clear Lake is a public university with a moderately-sized student population.
Bachelor's graduates who receive their degree from the criminology program make an average of $35,673 in their early career salary.
Any student who is interested in a bachelor's degree in criminology has to check out Texas A&M University - Kingsville. Texas A&M Kingsville is a medium-sized public university located in the town of Kingsville.
Students who graduate with their bachelor's from the criminology program state that they receive average early career earnings of $30,490.
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.