Criminology is above average in terms of popularity with it being the #53 most popular bachelor's degree program in the country. So, you have a fair amount of options to choose from when looking for a school.
College Factual looked at 6 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Criminology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Missouri ranking. When you put them all together, these colleges and universities awarded 291 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. 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 good education, not just how well they do in a particular major. To account for this 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.
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 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 full 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.
Since the program you select can have a significant impact on your future, we've developed a number of rankings, including this Best Criminology Bachelor's Degree Schools in Missouri list, to help you choose the best school for you.
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.
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Missouri State University - Springfield is one of the best schools in the country for getting a bachelor's degree in criminology. Missouri State is a fairly large public university located in the city of Springfield.
Bachelor's students who receive their degree from the criminology program earn about $36,185 in their early career salary.
It's difficult to beat University of Missouri - St Louis if you wish to pursue a bachelor's degree in criminology. Located in the suburb of Saint Louis, UMSL is a public university with a large student population.
Soon after graduating, criminology bachelor's recipients usually earn an average of $38,207 in their early careers.
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.
by our College Data Analytics Team
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. Below we explain some of the most important factors to consider before making your choice:
