Criminal Justice & Corrections is of the hottest master's degree programs in the United States, coming in as the #30 most popular major in the country. So, there are lots of possibilities to explore when you're trying to determine where you want to get your degree.
College Factual looked at 3 colleges and universities when compiling its 2025 Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Master's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking. Combined, these schools handed out 545 master's degrees in criminal justice & corrections to qualified students.
Choosing a Great Criminal Justice & Corrections School for Your Master's Degree
The criminal justice master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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 master'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 include a college's overall Best Colleges for a Master's Degree ranking which itself looks at a combination of different 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 master's degree is one indicator we use in our analysis to find the schools that offer the highest-quality education. After all, your master'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 much a school focuses on criminal justice & corrections students vs. other majors.
Major Demand - How many other criminal justice & corrections students want to attend this school to pursue a master'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 easy is it for criminal justice & corrections to pay back their student loans after receiving their master's degree.
Accreditation - Whether a school is regionally accredited and/or accredited by a recognized criminal justice & corrections related body.
Our complete ranking methodology documents in more detail how we consider these factors to identify the best colleges for criminal justice & corrections students working on their master's degree.
More Ways to Rank Criminal Justice & Corrections Schools
Since picking the right college can be one of the most important decisions of your life, we've developed the Best Criminal Justice & Corrections Master's Degree Schools in Virginia ranking, along with many other major-related rankings, to help you make that decision.
Best Schools for Master’s Students to Study Criminal Justice & Corrections in Virginia
Explore the top ranked colleges and universities for criminal justice & corrections students seeking a a master's degree.
Top Virginia Schools for a Master's in Criminal Justice
It is hard to beat George Mason University if you wish to pursue a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections. Located in the large suburb of Fairfax, GMU is a public university with a fairly large student population.
Criminal Justice & Corrections master's degree recipients from George Mason University earn a boost of about $7,103 above the average income of criminal justice & corrections graduates.
Any student pursuing a degree in a master's degree in criminal justice & corrections has to check out Liberty University. Liberty University is a fairly large private not-for-profit university located in the small city of Lynchburg.
Those criminal justice & corrections students who get their master's degree from Liberty University receive $6,930 more than the typical criminal justice student.
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.
The criminal justice master's degree program you select can have a big impact on your future. 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:
