The State of Criminal Justice Educational Programs in the United States: Bachelors’ Degrees, Curriculum Standards, and the Ongoing Quest for Quality

Abstract

While definitions for, and assessments of, the quality of degree programs in higher education are varied, in criminal justice the field has determined a quality program is one that meets certain standards involving such areas as program mission, curriculum, faculty credentials, and resources determined through “academic certification” by the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS).The problem is few programs have pursued certification and almost no research has otherwise assessed degree program quality. Using data collected from the population of bachelor’s degree programs in criminal justice (BCJ) operating during 2015–2016 (N = 670), this study assessed program curriculum using ACJS standards, and examined institutional, departmental, and programmatic influences on the number of standards met. Results indicated BCJ programs met few curriculum standards, and that departmental factors were especially significant influences on the number of standards met. These results warrant revisiting accreditation as the mechanism for insuring the quality of criminal justice academic programs.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Eugene Paoline and two anonymous referees for comments and suggestions on earlier versions of the paper, and Jeffrey Walker for statistical assistance. Any errors that remain are the author’s.

Notes

¹ Thanks to a reviewer for suggesting this as an additional reason for enrollment growth.

² One reviewer argued that the data found in Table 1 “overstated” the growth in the number of criminal justice degrees awarded, since the field wasn’t invented until the late 1960s/early 1970s. While true, the same claim could be made about growth in all fields of study. Until a field is “invented,” there are obviously no degree programs available in it. Once invented, growth then occurs as the field becomes legitimized in the academy and elsewhere, and students see the value of pursuing the degree for many reasons, including as a prerequisite for employment.

³ As of late December of 2017, a total of 10 institutions’ academic programs in criminal justice have been certified (Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences, 2017).

⁴ The focus of this study was baccalaureate programs designated by the U.S. Department of Education’s (n.d.) Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) as fitting into the category “homeland security, law enforcement, firefighting, and protective services” (code 43), which subsumes the codes 43.01 “criminal justice and corrections,” 43.02 “fire protection,” 43.03 “homeland security,” and 43.99 “homeland security, law enforcement, firefighting, and protective services -other.” Omitted were baccalaureates in criminology, law and society, or in sociology, political science, or public administration that offered a concentration in criminal justice.

⁵ The other major concern has been with the qualifications of faculty members teaching in these programs (see Morn, 1995).

⁶ One of the hallmarks characterizing the history of ACJS has been the struggle over which mechanism to use for insuring academic curricula at all levels meet quality standards (see Oliver, n.d.).

⁷ An analogy would be the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) that is “responsible for developing accreditation standards that define competent preparation and ensuring that social work programs meet these standards” (Council on Social Work Education, 2017, p. 1). CSWE, in turn, is recognized as an accrediting body by the Council for Higher Education Accreditation (CHEA), an association of 3,000 degree-granting colleges and universities that recognizes 60 institutional and programmatic accrediting organizations (Council for Higher Education Accreditation, 2017).

⁸ The “practitioner (professional) model” vs. the “social science (liberal arts) model” of criminal justice education has beguiled the discipline for decades and has been the cause of much friction within ACJS (see Flanagan, 2000; Morn, 1995).

⁹ For example, when assessing bachelor’s programs for academic certification ACJS considers nine areas, for which there are 49 national standards, and as many as 90 indictors that may be used to establish that the standards have been met (Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (2016).

¹⁰ Programs may also use “self-study” as a “quality assurance” mechanism and/or as part of larger institutional accreditation or reaccreditation processes. Accreditation and assessment software such as WEAVE (Centrieva, 2018) allows academic units (i.e., departments) to assess academic programs that includes articulating program goals and objectives and establishing benchmarks for them Data are then collected and analyzed to determine whether benchmarks have been met and if not, remedial action(s) are first articulated and then implemented.

¹¹ One other “quality assurance” mechanism that has been used by some bachelor’s programs is assessment using the Educational Testing Service’s (ETS) “major field test” (MFT) in criminal justice that was first offered in 2001. However, between 2015 and 2017 only 140 BCJ programs used the MFT (see Educational Testing Service, 2018).

¹² The list of schools is available upon request.

¹³ Branch campuses offering bachelor’s degree programs in criminal justice were counted as unique schools. In some instances, a school had more than one department offering a criminal justice degree and was included twice in the directory. Additionally, during academic years 2013–2014 and 2014–2015, more than two dozen “on-the-ground” campuses of the University of Phoenix ceased accepting students into their criminal justice programs and were excluded from the project.

¹⁴ Base characteristics returned from a search included a school’s Basic Classification or “tier;” Undergraduate Instructional Program Classification (describing the level of undergraduate degrees awarded, proportion of bachelor’s degree majors in the arts and sciences and in professional fields, and the extent to which an institution awarded graduate degrees in the same fields it awarded undergraduate degrees); Enrollment Profile Classification (which groups schools according to the mix of students enrolled at the undergraduate and graduate levels); Undergraduate Profile Classification (which described the undergraduate population with respect to three characteristics: the proportion of undergraduate students who attended part- or full-time; background academic achievement characteristics of first-year, first-time students; and the proportion of entering students who transferred from another institution); and Size & Setting Classification (describing a school’s student population number and its residential character).

¹⁵ This spreadsheet is available from http://carnegieclassifications.iu.edu/downloads/CCIHE2015-PublicDataFile.xlsx.

¹⁶ Appendix Table A1 summarizes the study variables, including their coding conventions.

¹⁷ Some may object to the inclusion of criminological theory rather than criminal justice theory as an area of coverage (see Maguire & Duffee, 2015). However, as constituted at the time of study, the ACJS standard for coverage was criminological theory.

¹⁸ Included were courses on diversity or ethics taught in other departments but required by the BCJ program.

¹⁹ According to ACJS protocol, no standard is accorded any greater weight than another. Thus, no weights were assigned to the individual standards.

²⁰ The larger study collected data on 20 institutional characteristics of each school, including (among others) nine Carnegie Classification features; region of the country in which the school was located (per Carnegie); total degrees and total baccalaureates awarded during 2013–2014; tuition costs for fall 2015—both in-state and out-of-state; FTE enrollments in the fall of 2015; and accreditation information.

²¹ Because schools report SAT scores, ACT scores, or both, Carnegie uses a concordance table to map combined SAT scores to the ACT Composite scale (College Board). They convert to the ACT scale because it has fewer possible scores than the combined SAT (verbal plus math), and fine distinctions were not required. Because of differences in the granularity of the two scales, converting from SAT to ACT involves less risk of error than converting in the opposite direction. For schools that reported both ACT and SAT scores, Carnegie created a weighted composite score based on the proportion of students who submitted each type of test score. If these percentages were not given, Carnegie weighted the two scores equally. Fractional composite scores were rounded to the nearest whole number see The Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education (2017, p. 1).

²² For example, some departments offered both a B.S. and a B.A. in criminal justice.

²³ Among the programs, 28% offered the degree exclusively online, 97% offered the degree in-person, and 25% offered the degree both online and in-person.

²⁴ For those schools using the quarter academic system, credits were converted to semester hours.

²⁵ Skewness was greater than ± 1.96, determined by dividing the skewness statistic by its standard error (Osborne, 2002).

²⁶ Some may question the use of inferential statistics to estimate parameters when working with population data. One justification for doing so is to consider a specific population as a sample of all possible populations containing the variable(s) of interest. Thus, the population of BCJ-granting schools from 2015 to 2016 was treated as a sample. For discussion of this point, see Rubin (1985) and Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (2009).

²⁷ Thanks to an anonymous referee for making this suggestion.